Crystal Birth

Well, those are just gorgeous.

The video is nothing but close up, sped up growth of reduced metal crystals from metallic ion solutions. There's no mention of what the anions are, but we do know that the crystals were grown via "electrocrystallization - Metal deposition actuated via electrodic reduction on the electrode surface. An electric current operates a metal deposition reaction."

But they're just pretty to watch...

Ecovative's Mushroom Tiny House

How's your little mushroom house going to stand up to that kind of an attack?

From their MushroomTinyHouse.com website

Ecovative uses mycelium (mushroom “roots”) to bond together agricultural byproducts like corn stalks into a material that can replace plastic foam. We’ve been selling it for a few years as protective packaging, helping big companies replace thousands of Styrofoam (EPS), and other plastic foam packaging parts. We’re now working to develop new products for building materials.

Here’s how it works. Mushroom Insulation grows into wood forms over the course of a few days, forming an airtight seal. It dries over the next month (kind of like how concrete cures) and you are left with an airtight wall that is extremely strong. Best yet, it saves on material costs, as you don’t need any studs in the wall, and it gives you great thermal performance since it’s one continuous insulated wall assembly. The finished Mushroom® Insulation is also fire resistant and very environmentally friendly.

In all honesty, that's a pretty exciting swap - fiberglass insulation or styrofoam packaging material for mycelium. That's going to be a heck of a lot easier to dispose of at the end of the material's life.



This is the part that excites me most for a material science classroom. They offer grow-it-yourself kits to make the ecovative material at home.

The giy.ecovative.com link doesn't work anymore. Instead, try this link. Yes, but what if somebody comes at your house with a pizza oven and some pepperoni?

You Won[']t Believe What Super Glue Does in Borax

If you're going to try this yourself, make sure to do this in a well ventilated area. As you can see at 4:58 (and onward), the fume that come off of any large amount of super glue require a lot of ventilation.

That being said, I have absolutely no idea why you would want to recreate this experiment at home.

I can't personally come up with any way to turn the immediate, catalytic solidification of cyanoacrylate glue in borax into something useful for class.

Does anybody out there in the blogosphere have any ideas about how to turn this into something useful?

From DNA to Silly Putty, the diverse world of polymers - Jan Mattingly

I don't really appreciate the cartoon graphics of chemists adding one drop of a reactant (2:25 and 3:15) to an Erlenmeyer flask resulting in an instantaneous explosion.

But that's a pretty good summary of just about everything we teach in our polymer chapter. The video introduces monomers and polymers, natural and synthetic polymers, addition and condensation polymerization, some history of man-made polymers (bakelite, Silly Putty), drawbacks of synthetic polymer use.

Maybe this will be an end of the chapter review next year.