Shrink! Shrank! Shrunk! Make Stylish Shrink Plastic Jewelry

One of the great attractions of materials science as a course and subject is the number of non-science connections that our students can make. There are hooks for the sport kid (composite baseball bats and hockey sticks), the builder kid (galvanizing deck hangers), the destroyer kid (dropping cement 'hockey pucks'), the art kid (glass making), and most definitely the craft kid (shrinky dinks and lots more).

Sometimes, though, I feel that I'm far out of my depth in that last area. Sure, I can explain to most student - at least to a depth of understanding with which they are comfortable - the concepts of a thermoplastic returning to its original structure/size/shape when heat is applied. I can even demonstrate it a few different ways (2L bottles, shrinky dinks).

What I can't do, though, is to show them anything really neat that I've made with a shrinky dink. I was a pretty linear, geometric kid. When the teachers gave me a blank piece of paper, crayons, and the instructions to 'make something', I invariably went in for a random bunch of geometric figures colored in all the crayon colors - sort of a stained glass mosaic with no planning at all. I do sometimes like how these look on the shrinky dinks because the colors get so dark and rich, but it's not exactly something that's going to hook the artsy-crafty kid into the neatness of shrinky dinks. That's why I was happy to stumble upon this book when looking at the 741s (comic books) at my local library.

This book is filled with ways to turn shrinky dinks into earrings, necklaces, even rings. There are techniques in ink jet printing, plastic sanding, and shaping that are far more crafty than I could ever have thought on my own. It's going to make a nice addition to my classroom library and just might open up a whole new section.

You can check out some of the interior pages and download pdfs of some of the designs from the book at the publisher's site or on the blog of one of the contributors. The book is available from Amazon. Here are a few others in the shrink plastic realm.

And in the interest of going multimedia, here's a video review of the book...

Meet the Eutectic, St. Louis' mystery mascot

That, apparently, is what a eutectic looks like in real life.

Who knew?

My understanding was that a eutectic looked more like this...



...but apparently at St Louis College of Pharmacy, their sports teams' mascot is Mortarmer McPestle, a Eutectic. Apparently, Morty has been working out because he has a six pack under that lab coat...

I particularly appreciate the logo showing Morty hard at work compounding...

If, by the way, you'd like to get a Eutectics shirt, they are available online. Looks like they would be perfect for summer camp, day 2.

Your friendly neighborhood blogger does enjoy Morty but is partial to Wally, a Wabash College Little Giant.

Cornstarch monster - non-Newtonian fluid on speaker

There isn't really anything too new and revolutionary in this video. It's pretty standard cornstarch and water on a speaker. It just happens to be very well done, showing the cornstarch mixture releasing entirely from the speaker. We also get some explorations of varying cornstarch/water ratios.

Fun stuff...

On track with SAP - Composites

Concerns in the faster and lighter areas drastically outweigh the cheaper ones when it comes to a Formula 1 racecar (a palindrome, by the way). To that end, the engineers use a ridiculous amount of high-technology materials in the efforts to shave an ounce or two from the car's weight. The most stunning comment in this video came about 0:58 for me - the chassis only weighs 45 kilograms.

I know freshman - little freshman - at my school who outweigh the chassis of a Formula 1 racecar.

What the heck?

Jet engine testing (superalloys)

I know a couple of our master teachers who should NOT watch this video because of their little fear of flying thing.

I, on the other hand, have no fear of flying at all. I don't fly very often - about twice in a typical year - and am totally relaxed when I am flying because I know that airplanes are overengineered to the point of ridiculous safety. I hope...

This video shows Rolls Royce testing one of their jet engines in the case of engine turbine blade during an event of catastrophic failure. The super slow-mo footage of the turbine going off balance and recovering is actually terrifically reassuring to me as a passenger.

"Liquid Fire" to Metal Sword in minutes! - A History of Ancient Britain

So many ancient arts have been lost and are recovered and relearned by various people throughout the decades. Here we see a trio of Brits cast a bronze sword, something that would have been commonplace a few centuries ago but that now looks almost like magic to us today.

It's gorgeous to watch, and their enthusiasm ain't bad, either.

One box of Girl Scout cookies worth $15 billion

As a chemistry teacher, hearing the quote "carbon is carbon" about 1:20 into this video just made my day.

In the video researchers from Rice University Labs turn girl scout cookies - trefoils from what I can tell - into graphene on copper, and the girl scout troop then performs some simple tests on the graphene sheet, clearly testing the conductivity (or resistance, maybe) of the product.

FYI: What's the lightest metal on Earth?

If you answered 'any lump of metal somebody else is carrying,' then you're sarcastic.

If, on the other hand, you answered 'metallic microlattice,' I'm thinking you probably already watched the video.

The challenges of materials science often boil down to some combination of 'make it lighter, cheaper, stronger.' Cut down the material's weight, and we can cut down the cost to ship it, to fly it, to make it, to throw it away when we're finished. Make the material stronger, and we can use less of it for a longer time and can push harder with or on it.

It seems that every time we start to think that we can't make strong materials from less material, somebody comes along to prove us wrong. According to a Popular Science post...

The key structural component is a series of hollow tubes. In a study published last November in Science, the researchers exposed a light sensitive liquid to UV light through a patterned mask, which created a three-dimensional photopolymer lattice. They then deposited a layer of nickel-phosphorous onto the polymer lattice, which was then etched. The remaining structure was a macroscopic material with hollow tubes as the base structural elements. The resulting material had a density of .9 mg/cm³. By comparison, ultralight silica aerogels are 1 mg/cm³.

I've held aerogel. I've let another ASM master teacher (cough-Becky-cough) break my aerogel, and to think that this material is lighter than aerogel is pretty impressive.

I'm putting the video after the jump because it auto-plays. Click through to watch.

Why Things Fail: from tires to helicopter blades, everything breaks

I'm really digging on Wired magazine's materials science coverage of late. I don't know if they're intentionally adding more reportage of materials or if it's a coincidence. I'm happy either way.

This month's issue has an article on Ford's Building 4 testing complex in which they test automotive parts - gas pedal hinges, engines, even entire vehicles - to failure and try to develop a failure analysis curve to show how long they can expect to have a part survive under typical circumstances. The article also covers Vextec - a failure analysis company - and their efforts to computerize the failure testing process, developing a way to model materials on the computer, create thousands of virtual versions of the material, and test each of them to failure without making and destroying thousands of prototypes, something that aligns wonderfully with the Materials Genome Initiative.

Good stuff here, plus it's about cars...always cool.

Point Pleasant Silver Bridge Part 2

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge - a more famous bridge collapse here in the US than the one shown in the video here. I'll post that video in a bit, but this one caught my eye for MatSciWit because of the discussion of the failure detection methods used here to find out why the Point Pleasant Silver Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed in 1967. They video uses computer recreation and eye-witness testimony to explore the pitting corrosion, tension/compression in manufacturing, and material failure on the suspension bridge.

This is merely the middle of three parts to the video. Check out the other two after the jump...

Making Silicon Wafers and Computer Chips

Making Ferrofluid

A great presentation by Scientifiic Tuesdays that covers not only how ferrofluids work, but how to make your own!

Making Diamonds with a Blowtorch

This video creates some interesting discussions about how diamonds are made, natural and synthetic, as well as allotropes of carbon.  Its also fun to talk about the cost involved in this experiment and why its not worth running a blowtorch for 8 hours to make tiny diamonds.

Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future

Much happiness this month when my new issue of Wired showed up with an article titled "Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future". Then I read the full article and got a wonderful description of tempering (tension/compression) and substitution tempering (dipping in a molten potassium salt) to adjust the properties of the glass. Plus it's all about the Gorilla Glass's that's used in the iPhones (and other touch-screen technologies), so it's stuff the kids actually will know about.

Check out the full article at the link above.

Making Stuff Smarter Activity Clip

"The Three Stooges Effect...when the Three Stooges tried to get through a doorway at the same time, and they couldn't?"

"The cornstarch doesn't want to get out of its own way, so when you push on it really hard, it can't move out of the way fast enough. When you hit it really slowly, you can push through it like a liquid."

The 'fill a pool with cornstarch and water' demonstration never gets old.

Making Stuff Stronger: Demonstration Clip

The Making Stuff series is an outstanding exploration of materials engineering and science with four episodes: Smaller, Stronger, Smarter, and Cleaner. In the series David Pogue plays the inquisitive and often comedic and corny host who looks at a number of materials being made at the cutting edge of materials science.

Here he takes a look at Kevlar, providing an excellent graphic showing the polymer's structure, and then suggesting a possible new use for a thick, Kevlar cable.

Scientific Tuesdays: Turn Styrofoam into pseudo-plastic

The demonstration of dissolving Styrofoam into acetone is one that we do in the summer ASM workshops, typically selling the demonstration by counting how many Styrofoam peanuts you can crush into a film canister, having hidden a small amount of acetone in the canister before the beginning of the demonstration.

At the end of the demonstration, however, we always end up with an amount of goopy, dissolved Styrofoam mess. The presenter in this video uses the term pseudo-plastic for what is left at the end when the goopy mess hardens. I'm a little curious as to why the pseudo comes into play, but that may have to do with my lack of understanding of exactly what plastic means.

Anybody want to clarify for me?

Macedonians (Geeks) created cement three centuries before the Romans

"The Greeks are hoping that tourists will flock to see a building that is second only in significant to the Parthenon in Athens." Yeah, but I'm thinking that the Parthenon has a better PR department.

The title certainly suggests more about cement than the video actually delivers - with the only mention of the cement coming in at 0:27 and lasting about ten seconds.

Investment Casting (Lost Wax) Process

The lost wax casting process is an impressive thing to watch and one that can be replicated - admittedly in a far simpler version - in the classroom. No, you probably would't be making anything quite as complicated as shown in this video, but having students make and carve a simple piece of jewelry - a ring, for example - is very much achievable.

Swimming and walking gel

I really don't know how to characterize this video. Yes, there's a clear material there - 'magnetic particles embedded in a polymer', but it's not quite like anything I've seen before.

Admittedly, though, I could probably watch the 'snakes...made from magnetic gel' on a loop for hours.

Machine creates aluminum helmet - incredible

The concept is pretty simple: carve a block of aluminum into a shape. The execution, however, is nearly mesmerizing as the machine sends aluminum shavings flying with computerized precision.

There are quite a few steps skipped, however, and I would love to see the entire process in a single time-lapse video. I would also like to know how close to 100% recycling the manufacturers are with the cast-off aluminum shavings. I would hope pretty close.

How CD's are made

The production of some of our materials is absolutely masterful to watch. Here the production of a compact disc is followed from start to finish, largely taking place in a clean room. I'll readily admit that I had no clue whatsoever what went into the making of the cd's that I've been playing for years.

Now, if only we could get a video explaining all the steps that go into the making of an mp3 file. That I'd totally watch.

Liquid metal gallium alloy galinstan

It's amazing how much the properties of metals can change when they're alloyed together. Here the wordless videographer shows how different galinstan (gallium - indium - tin (stannous)) is from the metals from which the alloy is formed.

Rzeźbienie w szkle (carving in the glass - Polish)

In this video an assumedly Polish craftsman (the video's posted title is in Polish, so I'm guessing the video is from Poland, too) turns a blob of glowing, molten glass into a horse figurine in a minute and a half with no reheating whatsoever.

The craftsmanship here is just stunning and must have been repeatedly practiced, his every movement a step toward the finished product. Of particular interest is the color change as the glass cools. From brilliant white with just a hint of pink, the glass fades in the extremities first with the horse's nose and feet turning to black accents on the still bright pink body long before the full body turns a dark black at the end of the video.

Also fascinating is the changing pliability of the glass as it cools. Initially the workman has to roll the blob back and forth because it flows so easily, but as he works the glass and it cools, he is able to spend longer and longer without gravity taking hold, eventually opening the horse's legs with his tongs at the end.

Great stuff...

Metals with a Memory

Memory metals - nitinol being the one with which I am most familiar - are a fascinating material with their solid state transition radically changing the material's macroscopic shape. The old chestnut of turning a straight piece into a coil in hot water is nice, but the creativity of using metals with different transition temperatures to make a little sculpture here with uncurling biceps, straightening spine and neck, able to 'stand' straight up as the temperature rises is very well done.

Bouncing bearings on liquid metal

Advertising is advertising. I think we all know that.

And the advertising demonstrations set up in sporting good stores aren't always the truest indicators of a particular piece of equipment's final performance. Yes, the materials shown probably perform the specific functions being demonstrated very well. Here we can see that the rebound of a metal ball off of liquidmetal's proprietary alloy as compared to the rebound from a titanium surface.

We have to assume that all the other variables - material thickness, cold or hot treating perhaps - are the same between the materials and that the two metal balls are also the same. If so, we can safely say that the liquidmetal does, indeed, provide a greater rebound (coefficient of restitution if I remember my physics correctly). Now, what does that mean on the surface of a golf club, in a tennis racket, or as a fishing pole?

That I can't definitively say from the limited data I have before me. I am glad, though, that their website does provide a little of the science behind the fact that the alloys possess ' an "amorphous" atomic structure, which is truly unique. By contrast to the crystalline structure, no discernable patterns exist in the atomic structure of the unique Liquidmetal alloys. As such, properties superior to the limits of conventional metals can be achieved.'

Has anyone actually used anything from the liquidmetal line?

Galvanizing a Towmaster Trailer

Early this week the students at ASM's corrosion-themed three-day workshop (hosted by the University of Akron's National Center for Education and Research on Corrosion and Materials Performance - that's a mouthful) got to tour the AZZ Galvanizing plan in Canton, OH. There the AZZ folks gave a great PowerPoint (which you can see here - be warned, however, that it's a 150MB pdf of the presentation, kinda big) on the advantages of and science behind the hot dip galvanizing process - about which they might be admittedly a little biased. They then took the teachers/campers to see the process in action. I - as one of those campers - can say it was a pretty impressive sight to see, particularly as the steel light post was lowered into the molten zinc which began to spit and splash due to the temperature difference of the materials.

The finished post section practically glowed from the brilliant, shiny zinc coating as it was removed from the zinc bath. Great process to see in action and great protection against corrosion.

Thermite Reaction - Smash! Bang! Boom!

There's so much science hanging here in this remarkably simple-to-perform demonstration.

Steve Spangler - former elementary science teacher - her explains that the kinetic energy from the ball bearing's banging together turn into thermal energy - enough to burn holes in the piece of construction paper. He then goes on to show the far cooler - to me, anyway - reaction of iron oxide (the rust on the outside of the ball bearings) and aluminum. Most folks - if they know that reaction - know it as thermite (check a few thermite reactions here).

Typically, though, the thermite reaction involves mixing aluminum and iron (III) oxide powders in a flower pot or some ceramic vessel. The reaction is then started with a separate reaction (it has high activation energy) and then produces molten iron and a huge pile of sparks. It's outstanding to watch FROM A DISTANCE. That whole FROM A DISTANCE and the need for some second reaction means that thermite is typically reserved for high school and college chemistry classes.

Spangler - who didn't come up with the idea, by the way - brings the reaction into far more manageable form by taking a rusty ball bearing (covered in iron oxide) right up against one covered in aluminum foil. Same reactants...good energy to start the reaction (from the KE of the ball bearings)...great sparks.

Yeah, it takes a little practice to get the technique down right, but it's way safer than the big thermite reaction that throws molten iron all over the place. Plus, you get to clean up the rusty ball bearing in the process.

Al _(s) + Fe₃O_{4 (s)} --> Al₂O_{3 (s)} + Fe _{(s or l)}

We can look at this for...

• activity series - aluminum more active than iron, so oxygen goes to aluminum
• energy transfer - kinetic energy becomes thermal energy becomes chemical energy becomes light and heat energy again
• corrosion - We're un-corroding the iron in favor of the aluminum.
• electrochemistry - electrons are leaving the aluminum (so it's the anode) and going to the iron (so it's the cathode)

I am so happy that I just got myself a pair of these rusty ball bearings myself.

First day of awesome AP chemistry, here we come.



Update: If you're looking to buy yourself a set of these, Flinn Scientific offers a slightly larger version of these rusty steel balls (AP 6256) for (as of April, 2013, anyway) $26.60. Plus you get a couple of sheets of aluminum foil, which are easily worth like a thousand dollars or something. They also have a video on their site (that I can't figure out how to embed here)

Smack Me on the Head With a Shovel

Watching d30 at play (better in the video below) is like watching anybody play with Silly Putty. The explanation given (again, explained in the video below) is that the "intelligent molecules all band together upon impact...[to] absorb the shock and get hard."

Sounds like a pretty cool material and one that I need to get my hands on a sample of. Maybe a trip to Play-It-Again Sports is in need, 'cause this is a material I need to get my hands on.

Mercury Attacks Aluminum

How it's Made - Steel Wool

Nitinol Experiments

Scientific Tuesday's presents a bunch of easy trick to do with Nitinol.

Chemistry Now - Water

This a great introduction to many of the wonderful properties of water.  If you enjoy this video, be sure to check out other Chemistry Now videos!

Titanium hammer manufacturing

I need to get my hands on a titanium hammer. I can't quite wrap my head around the 'but it hits just as hard' part of the design. Yeah, I get that a lower mass object would be easier to accelerate, but I would think that the lower mass object - the titanium hammer - wouldn't deliver nearly the same amount of force.

I love seeing the various steps involved in the manufacturing process here, though. It's gorgeous to see each step along the way - especially the investment casting. Gorgeous.

Has anybody out there actually gotten to use a titanium hammer? If so, wanna give a report?

Ross Nanotechnology Introduction

The imagery here of chocolate sauce just rolling right off of white shoes - a particularly good color choice for the product demo - is stunning. For a brief while I even thought I understood what was happening - clearly the material is a nonpolar compound. Water's polar; anything nonpolar would 'repel' the water.

And then they started dumping oil on the product with equal success. Clearly I have some learning to do before I understand just what makes something super hydrophobic.

What Makes Gold So Special?

The BBC series Bang Goes the Theory markets itself as sort of a shorter-form, British Mythbusters, but tends toward just answering simple questions or showing off science tricks (melting glass in a microwave, inflating a huge balloon in just one breath, etc). Here they look at why gold is used in electronics (like the presenter's cell phone) if it's so expensive (1000 per ounce according to the presenter).

I'm not entirely sold on the explanation that he gives - regarding simply the number of protons in the nucleus - because that would mean all large atoms would be non-reactive. I think there's something about gold's completely full d orbital, but explaining quantum mechanics and the electron orbital theory is probably a bit beyond the scope of the television programme (see, British spelling?).

It does, however, do a great job showing the kinds of things that we look at in materials science when we explore the activity series. Gold is very, very low on the activity series - down there with platinum and silver, all used for jewelry. Wonder if there's some reason for that...

Oh, I tried this experiment in class once. Dropped my gold wedding ring into concentrated hydrochloric acid and hoped. Turns out it worked just fine, but my wife wasn't too thrilled to hear about the experiment after the fact, so I don't do that anymore even though I'm pretty sure the science is solid.

Turbo Encabulator - Version 2

Have you ever had someone sound like this when they are explaining something to you?  It can be frustrating.  Do you think you ever sound like this to your students???

Students Invent a Better Pothole Patch

Need a great application for non-Newtonian fluids?  Look no further!  I also try to stress the importance of the repeated testing and research that these students did to turn an idea into a useful product.  I also kick myself when wondering why I didn't think of that.

Zinc Oxide

A hilarious, and not so politically correct, take on the value of one metal oxide.

Making Coins

This video is perfect for demonstrating the practical application of many of the metal labs.  Who doesn't love money???

Laminar Flow

Aircraft Carrier Made of Ice

I was introduced to this video while making composite ice pucks with my class.  We started with three circular plastic containers.  The first was plain water, the second was water with newspaper strands in it, and the third was water filled with sawdust.  We stuck the containers in the freezer and I promised the students we would be testing them the next day.  One of my best nerds raised his hand right before the bell and asked if anyone had heard about the aircraft carrier made of ice.  Needless to say, it was the topic of conversation for the rest of the class and the students were begging for the video the next day.

Love Letter to Plywood. by Tom Sachs

Don't accept any substitute with that short seven-minute "A Love Letter to Plywood". This is the new, improved version of the man's love letter to the most widely-used laminar composite out there.

evoSHIELD Demo

Becky Heckman (one of our ASM master teachers) showed me her son's new evoSHIELD wrist guard this morning. He already had one but had just gotten a new one, and she made him wait to fit it until I could see the thing fresh out of its package. The wrist guard (you can see specifically that product in the video below) is a neoprene sleeve and a plastic insert. The insert is initially sealed in a thick, assumedly air-tight foil package. When the package is opened, the insert is flexible like a gel. The insert is then placed in the sleeve and worn. As air reacts with the insert, the insert turns into a rock-hard plastic over the next twenty or so minutes in an exothermic process. Because the flexible insert is worn on the player's wrist as it hardens, the protection is almost perfectly fitted to the player's wrist forever, giving the player good - according to data I found online - protection against impact.

The company also offers similar products for hockey, football, baseball, softball, lacrosse, and even shooting pads. I'm fascinated by this and want to know way more science than what their website provides.

Anybody have any ideas on the science here?





Kinda cool that it's a university project gone right, too.

Donald Sadoway: the missing link to renewable energy

I think we can all agree that our current energy needs - and the needs predicted by our perpetually increasing demand - are untenable in the long run. Whether a scientist chooses to attack the problem from the supply end (more wind farms, increased nuclear production, clean coal, hydrofracking, gerbils on tiny wheels) or the demand end (fluorescent lights, home insulation, adjusting the thermostat, solar-powered laptops),he or she will find even their smallest success in quick and huge demand if they look to be afforadble, scaleable, and effective.

Here we see Donald Sadoway's TED talk on his development of a liquid metal battery (magnesium / molten salt / antimony) as well as his mentoring of and dependence on graduate students and post-doctoral students, choosing these intelligent but inexperienced folks rather than the more experienced battery experts whose thinking might be a little more regimented, a little less willing to experiment.

I have lots of questions about the chemistry here - how easily are the metals sourced, in the larger collections of batteries how does the heat dissipate or does it need to, what salt is in the center, how safe are the batteries, how quickly can the batteries deliver power and how quickly can they be recharged - but I am certainly intrigued.

Bioabsorbable pins are metabolized by the body

Materials to be used in the human body have a number of difficult and often contradictory requirements. The materials must be chemically and biologically acceptable by the human body, light weight, durable, and ideally - but of lower import - inexpensive.Here we can see a new polymer (lactic/glycolic acid copolymer - PLGA) that can simply biodegrade and be metabolized by the human body once the material is no longer needed.

Steelmaking: Blast Furnace

Smelting of ores into native metals is an old technology. In a blast furnace an oxygen-poor material (carbon, typically) is introduced into an ore under white hot conditions where the carbon grabs the oxygen leaving purer native metals leaving slag behind.

In this video we get an initial animation of the blast furnace itself. Then we get footage of the native metal and a discussion of the next steps for the carbon-rich iron that is produced.

Surgery without stitches

Again scientists look to the natural world for an ideal material, this time looking at crabs to mimic the chitin attachment between the crab's shell and underlying musculature. This material - surgilux - is a "thin polymer film based on chitin" that 'melds' to the flesh when heated via infrared light.

According to Dr John Foster in the video, the melding is simple, cost-effective, anti-microbial, non-scarring, and non-dependent on the surgeon's skill level.

Science Nation - Metal Foam

Well that's a simple goal: something lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel.

Turns out that such a material is possible as shown here by Afsaneh Rabiei who has made a composite metal foam - an aluminum matrix with hollow steel spheres. In this video we see the production of and testing of such a material. We then get some possible uses of the metal foam.

JWST 09: Not So Heavy Metal

Most of our students are at least passingly familiar with iron, copper, aluminum, even gold, silver, and mercury, but most of them - and many of us as well - are far less familiar with other metals, many of which are absolutely essential for many of our industrial processes.

Here we get a look at the mining and processing of beryllium ore into beryllium dust - which is sadly not shown in the video but is given a sodium chloride stand-in.

In the next video we get a look at how the beryllium powder is melting and cast into blanks, how the blanks are then processed into mirrors for the James Webb space telescope, how the  mirrors are checked for defects and then partially hollowed out to reduce their weight.

How It's Made: Lawn Bowling Balls

I'll admit that lawn bowling balls might not look like the most technologically advanced piece of equipment that your students could ever explore, but the steps that go into creating a high-quality ball here are pretty impressive - from molding the melamine to carving to polishing to finally testing the finished product.

Turn Pennies Silver and Gold (chemistry trick)

In our workshops we use a procedure that I greatly prefer to the one shown in this video, but the 'trick' of turning pennies to gold never gets old. Sure it's a brass alloy of copper and zinc, but it looks like magic.

The Story of Electronics

Materials Science is all about choosing the right material for the right use. That might mean that you need to find the cheapest material, the most durable, the most flexible, the most whatever. This video explores the challenge of finding the least environmentally damaging material, particularly for use in electronics so that we aren't poisoning the workers who make or recycle the electronics.

RF Woodwelder - Scott & Sargeant Woodworking Machinery

It's not exactly Harpo Marx's finest performance, but here we get a wordless demonstration of a wood 'welding' machine that sends radio frequencies into a wood/glue bond setting the glue in seconds rather than hours.

How Ductile Iron Pipes Made

I promise that the title is as I've typed it above. The lack of a helping verb or a contraction bothers me, but that's how the video is titled.

Here we follow the production of ductile iron pipes from the sourcing (primarily recycled iron/steel), smelting, mixing, casting, and finishing the pipe. The spinning mold is particularly fascinating.

NASA: Blacker Than Black

This video gives us a look at how NASA uses carbon nanotubes to produce a surface that reflects an absolute minimum of lightwaves for their optical instruments in space. The video looks at the structure of the nanotubes as well as some of the durability tests that they have conducted to make the nantube coatings more durable.

What is graphene

Graphite is one of the allotropes of carbon - along with diamond and buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs). Graphite exists as a series of hexagonal-based carbon layers, a single layer of which is known as graphene, the exploration of which lead to the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In this video the structure and electrical properties of graphene are explained in very simple, udnerstandable language.

The science behind roller coasters: Top Thrill Dragster

The Top Thrill Dragster in Sundusky, Ohio's Cedar Point is a marvel of engineering - and was especially so when it was introduced in 2003. The force and materials required to accelerate the train at the speeds needed to peak the tower required some pretty impressive materials. That aspect shows up at about 3:10 into the above video.

Silk - If spiders and worms can do it, why can't we?

Biomimetics is a fascinating field in which scientists take inspiration from the natural world to improve out technologies. Here a video from the National Science Foundation looks at one of the major struggles that scientists are trying to overcome in making artificial spider silk - particularly at the difficulty in storing liquid spider silk until it is solidified after it comes through the spinnerets.

Brainiac Alkali Metals

The BBC show Brainiac produced some outstandingly entertaining and sensational experiments involving vaguely science topics. They tended toward explosions and chucklesome comments along the way.

Sadly, however, at least some of their experiments - including the one above - were exaggerated with conventional explosives to make things a little more exciting than they would be in real life. You can check out more details and the stories reporting their fraudulent  behavior over on my other blog. I still show this video in class, however, because I enjoy reminding students that just because they see it on tv or on YouTube doesn't necessarily make the explanation right or real.

I also follow the video up with this one which is - as far as I can tell - real.



It is, however, a little less spectacular.

BysteSize Science: Super Buoyant: New Materials Could Make a Horse Float

The crystals of silver nitrate on the surface of these copper mesh boats look a lot like the dendritic silver crystals that we can see under the microscope in our single replacement reactions between copper wire and silver nitrate. At least that's what they look like if the image shown in the video is accurate.

I am consistently amazed at the application of simple concepts that we study in class.

Chemistry of Ice Cream

We're edging toward food science entirely here, but there's still some serious concerns regarding the rate of (ice) crystal growth in ice cream production.

Hard Candy Chemistry!

It can be daunting to do glass batching. You need a kiln, DFCs crucibles, and a fair bit of confidence. Sometimes it's easier to purchase the DFCs than it is to build up the confidence.

Working with candy, however, takes a lot less confidence because the worst that can usually happen is a nasty, blackened pot, and there's a lot that can be learned about glass by using candy as an analogue.

Plus, if you do it right, you get a sweet reward at the end.

MIT: Bottle coating speeds up ketchup pouring

I don't know that leftover ketchup in bottles is one of our society's greatest problems, but I certainly understand that being able to get all the food out of all of its containers would reduce food waste by a a few teaspoons per jar which would add up to a significant savings when added up.

Plus there's the fact that watching ketchup (I'm not going to type catsup, it bugs me) just glide out of the bottle is phenomenally cool.

Ross Nanotechnology Introduction

There's slick and then there's slick.

Ross Nanotech produces NeverWet coating - for which I may just be first in line because it's so cool. They're presented as being super-hydrophobic, meaning that they repel water and any water-based solution - with remarkable efficiency.

A little hydrophobic coating - ScotchGuard and the like - prevents some staining on fabric, but a superhydrophobic coating would make fabrics nearly unstainable - at least from any water-based liquid.

Ring rolling machine from Anyang Forging Press Machinery Industry Co., Ltd

Just about any time I see a video of glowing hot metal (or glass) being worked by a machine or a tradesman, I'm in for watching the video through to the end.

Here we see a piece of metal being hot worked by people who - to my fairly untrained eyes - look like they don't have nearly enough safety equipment. Thanks to the Anyang Forging Press Machinery Industry Co., Ltd for posting the video.

Big Bang Theory: So Funky

I'm assuming that this video will be un-embeddable soon. Most of the Big Bang Theory videos are - unless they're hosted by CBS itself.

Putting oobleck on a speaker can be a great, great time. I particularly recommend something with a massive, thumping bass line and little else. Most actual songs have too many other tones - maybe try a pure tone generator hooked up to an amplifier.

Surprisingly to our Princeton students, "Superbass" is awful for this.

Dislocations in motion

I'm still working on figuring out exactly what's going on in this video. I know the image was taken with a transmission electron microscope and that the sample must have been only a few atoms thick - thinner than a wavelength of light. The squiggly, darker lines show where the crystal dislocations are moving through the material because of some stress - warming, perhaps - being applied to the sample.

I'm struggling to find out any more than that, but I'm stunned to actually see the dislocations that we discuss in our metals unit, things that we can feel on a macroscopic level when we work metal - cold work it, anneal it, temper it, quench it, roll it, draw it.

If anybody knows more about this, feel free to explain.

Correlle Runway

Thanks to Alexis at the 2012 Houston ASM camp for bringing this commercial to my attention. It's a great way for Correlle to show the durability of their products. I'm a fan - especially when the plates are double bagged in Ziploc and chucked against a wall.

Good stuff

Alcohol Reduction

This one stuns me.

My experience with the raku process comes entirely from Materials Science - either the summer workshops or the class at Princeton High School. That means I'm used to doing raku reduction with pots about as big as an apple or so - and we drop those into a metal can with newspaper and/or sawdust. That's about it. Sure it's a little frightening because of the fire and heat, but it's a controllable situation.

When I mention raku to art teachers, they ask about the outside pit and the fire and all sorts of stuff that exists on a scale far above what I've ever worked with. Then you get to using misted alcohol as your combustible fuel source. That's another level of awesome/frightening entirely.

Plus these folks aren't wearing long pants, close-toed shoes, heavy gloves, goggles, any of the stuff that we use in science class, so I'm a little freaked out.

Liquid armor

I dig the liquid body armor video that we show in our summer ASM workshop powerpoint, but I like this video way better.

The video quality's better. The science explanation is deeper. I dig the closeup views of the treated fabric.

Either way, they're both the same - or very similar - applications of the oobleck idea - that of a non-newtonian fluid.

Prestressed Concrete Beams

Concrete is awesome under compression. Concrete can take a huge amount of stress without failing. Concrete, however, is pretty awful under tension. Iron is awesome under tension but not so great under compression - eventually failing in pretty spectacular ways. Combine the two, however, and you get some pretty outstanding results.

One of our master teachers, Andy Nydam, tells a great story about a mother - I don't want to suggest that it was his mother because I wouldn't bet his reputation on that detail - who allowed one brother to payback a transgression by the other brother by using a single towel hit. The mother envisioned a single snap with a towel, but the wronged brother laid the towel out overnight in the freezing weather soaked in water. Ice - bad under tension, good under compression...towel - bad under compression, good under tension...composite frozen towel - good under both.

I'm not saying; I'm just saying.

Shift Happens

Shift Happens was first presented online in 2006 and has been remade all the way through version 6.0 now. The facts in the various videos echo a quote that we use in our opening presentation:

"To be a teacher is to be a prophet, because you are not preparing kids for the world you grew up in nor are you preparing kids for the world today. You are preparing kids for a world you cannot imagine." ~ Gordon Brown, MIT Dean of Engineering.

So much of the things that our students will need to know when they are in the job market, when they are changing jobs for the umpteenth time are things that we don't know, that we've never heard of, that we never imagined would exist.

So I guess we might as well teach them a few skills that could apply to just about anything that thy might choose to do.

Silver nitrate and copper

Dendritic crystal growth is a gorgeous thing. In our summer workshops we use a pounded copper piece and a single drop of silver nitrate solution - always trying to minimize the amount of chemicals that we use. We then place the slide under a stereoscope - or a digital microscope, whatever's available doncha know - to show to the entire workshop.

Thanks to Todd Bolenbaugh at Tolles Career & Technical Center for this video - as well as all of the others that he's filmed over the past few years.

Salol crystal growth

In our summer workshops one of the labs that we do on day one involves melting phenyl salicylate on a slide and watching the melt recrystallize under the microscope. Phenyl salicylate is also known as salol - as its named here. This experiment does a great job of showing the crystal growth from a single point of seed crystal as well as the grain boundaries that form along the way.

Deadly Crystal Cave

1000 feet below Naica, Mexico is a lead, zinc, and silver mine in which scientists have found a cavern filled with some of the largest gypsum crystals anyone has ever seen. Uncomfortably, however, the cave is also filled with air up to 136 F and humidity above ninety percent making exploration more than a little hazardous. Luckily, the National Geographic explorers documented the cave before it was supposedly refilled to allow the crystals to remain undamaged and possibly continue growing even larger.

Engineered Material Arresting System

Material science is all about choosing the right material for the right job. And if we can't find the right material, we can always modify it. Here we see a solution to the problem of airport runway overruns.

The requirements - as mentioned in the video - are things like fuel fire resistance, low cost, access to emergency vehicles, ability to withstand jet blast, limited damage to the aircraft, replaceability. and durability through freeze/thaw cycles. The solution given here is a composite of cement designed to slow the aircraft as the Emergency Material Arresting System (EMAS) is destroyed.

Liquid body armor

Playing with oobleck is all well and good, but if we just stop there we don't get to the cool applications of non-newtonian fluids. Lucky for us the military didn't stop there.

A pool filled with non-newtonian fluid

It's one thing for us to wander outside on Monday of our ASM summer workshops and play around with a bucket of cornstarch. It's another thing entirely to see a pair of excitable Spaniards run back and forth across a pool filled with cornstarch.

That's taking material science to a whole different level.

Some of our teachers have taken the opportunity to use this video as a cross-curricular opportunity with the local foreign-language teachers. Others just kick back and enjoy the ride.

Look around you: Calcium

Look Around You was a short-lived BBC Two programme (their spelling) that spoofed the educational films of earlier years.To me the series is reminiscent of things I saw on PBS in the 80's. I'm guessing other folks will recognize the tone from other decades as well. Fifteen episodes in total were created, all of which make various appearances on YouTube from time to time. All of them contain material that touches upon material science topics in fanciful ways.

Be warned that the Look Around You information is far from accurate and should be taken with a massive grain of salt. There are also a few scenes that maybe aren't quite appropriate for younger audiences. They're not vulgar or anything, just a little odd and adultish.

Oh, and be warned that the humor is very British.

KOG Rolling Glass for sheet glass

Kokomo Opalescent Glass in - shockingly - Kokomo, Indiana is one of the country's top art glass manufacturers, and happens to be only three hours from my house. Looks like I have a field trip to make since Caryn Jackson - another of our ASM master teachers - endorses the factory tour so heartily.

Here we get to see the workers/artisans/guys mixing glass from their beehive and rolling the glass into sheets which will then be sold in the factory's shop. Lucky for us the KOG company has posted twenty-two videos from their factory.

Turbo Encabulator

The turbo encabulator has its origin in - at least according to Wikipedia - a 1944 article from British Institution of Electrical Engineers Students’ Quarterly Journal. By the time Bud Haggart - shown in the above video - got around to filming an industry video for the encabulator, the encabulator was a bit of an industry legend, having entertained engineers for more than three decades.

In our summer workshops, we include this video early to illustrate the point that many of our students view science as a bit of a foreign language, hearing our explanations the same way that we hear Bud's explanations of the turbo encabulator.

There are, of course, a number of various versions of this video. More of those are posted after the jump...

Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk here covers the topic of how schools kill creativity. It's one of the more motivational speeches that I've heard about education in a while. It's a bit long, but pretty much all of us try to find a chance to show this at our summer ASM workshops. It's that good.

How I Built a Toaster

Thomas Thwaites apparently is a tinkerer. In this video he goes through the highlights of his attempts to recreate - from scratch - the simplest electric appliance he could come up with: a cheap, plastic-covered toaster. He went to the mines to collect the ore, smelted it down to form the plugs and wires. He attempted to mine plastic - then went with forming a bioplastic instead. Finally, he plugged the toaster in and successfully toasted bread for about five seconds.

In his words he "considered it a partial success."

If you're interested in learning a little more, check out his book about the project.

I'm a little stumped on all the possible labels that could apply to this one. Feel free to suggest more.

A Day Made of Glass 2

We've seen the Day Made of Glass original before, and this is sort of more of the same with numerous possibilities of what glass might be able to do in the future. I remember when we first started showing these videos in camps a couple of years ago. At that point most of these glass possibilities - the interactive windows, the smart phones that connect with the tabletops - seemed hugely futuristic. Now it seems that they're just around the corner.

A Day Made of Glass

This is clearly a commercial for Corning's possible future glass products. I get that, but it's still filled with pretty stunning glass possibilities. Some of our master teachers view this as a dream future - filled with connectivity in every nook and cranny of our lives. Others, however, view the exact same future - one in which we are connected to the world at every moment of our day - as an abhorrent possibility.

Personally I'm somewhere between the two extremes.

Polar bear shatters glass

Here we see a clearly devious polar bear conducting a little destructive testing on the window of his enclosure. Lucky for us two Dutch documentarians were there filming in front of the aquarium (is that the correct term for where polar bears are kept?).

I saw something along this line a few years back when they were installing the new polar bear exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo. Apparently the forklift tapped the glass a bit more firmly than intended, shattering the glass in a gorgeous spider-web pattern.. The zoo left the glass up initially with a note explaining that the shattering was a show of how well the glass was designed. Even though one of the panes shattered, the other panes laminated together had held the strength.

I'm thinking that we're got a composite of laminated glass here. With the shattering, spider-web pattern, I think we might have tempered glass, too. Thoughts?

Source - care2