The Library of Rare Colors

(Turns out I'd previously posted an article about this Harvard library. No matter, because the video is a bit more interactive than the article is.)

This is one of Tom's rarer videos in that he barely talks during it. He introduces and closes the video but largely lets the Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies explain the organization of, history of, and depth and breadth of their collection of color standards.

A few years back, the ASM summer camp in Indianapolis (RIP the Indy camp, apparently) got to tour the labs at the Indianapolis Art Museum and got a glimpse of a much smaller pigment collection that they used there to help determine the provenance of artworks but knowing when certain pigments came into popular use. If a pigment from a painting was first used in the 1820's, for example, it's unlikely to have been in a painting claimed to have been done by Titian.

The Venn diagram in my head between art and material science continues to grow.

Bizarre liquid jets explained - the Kaye effect

Hold on a second. I'll be right back after I grab a tray and a bottle of shampoo.

The streams of shampoo above shoot out from the pile of shampoo with nothing other than gravity and really thin streams falling from above.

Turns out it's because shampoo is sheer thinning (like ketchup is) but that shampoo makes the transition from high to low viscosity very quickly, quickly enough to create divots (as its viscosity decreases) in the accumulating pile but then become highly viscous and shoot off the other side of the 'ramp' that they've just created.

Who knew?

Summer 2019 ASM Teacher Material Science Camps

The summer of 2019 looks to be a bit complicated to schedule with many weeks having only one or two camps but others having as many as nine. That means that we need a whole bunch of our master teachers to man those busy weeks and will be compressing the ordering of supplies from Flinn, Ed Inn, and IASCO. Hope Ronda's ready for us.

If you're new to the blog, take a look at the ASM material science summer camps. They're phenomenal, week-long, free summer camps for teachers where we teach inexpensive techniques for hands-on science explorations (and the science content behind them) geared toward middle- and high-school science classes.

They're awesome.

How It's Made Computer Recyling Gold

I'm actually a little surprised to see this type of recycling happening in what looks like a European country. Admittedly, the video seemingly does what it can to avoid showing us anything to
distinguish what country this recycling is happening in - no writing on much other than the forklift, no spoken language - at best it looks like it might be a Northern European country. Everything I'd heard was that this mostly took place only in countries with far less strict environmental and worker safety regulations.

I love that they're using aqua regia to dissolve the gold.

Then we get some outstanding electrochemistry going on with electrochemical reduction growing copper then silver then gold crystals. Phenomenal stuff (mostly in animation, admittedly).

Trigger warning - 4:15 - Corny joke relating fish and chips to computer chips.

How we solved the mystery of Libyan desert glass

I'm ready with another Christmas gift idea for your favorite MatSciWit blogger.

Today's article looks at the evidence for a meteorite impact in Libya creating temperatures high enough to fuse sand into glass. The scientists were trying "to nut out" (their phrase, seriously, check the article) whether the meteorite actually impacted the Earth's surface (leaving a crater that hasn't ever been found) or whether an airburst could have released enough energy to fuse the silica into glass.

The researchers looked for mineral evidence of meteorite impacts - zirconia and reidite. The 'smoking gun' (again, their phrase) would have been reidite, but they found no reidite - because it resrcytalizes into zircon if given time and cooling.

What they did find, however, when looking at "the crystal orientation of tiny interlocking grains of recystalized zircon" was that the orentiations showed evidence of former deformation from impact - something that could not have been created by an airburst.

That's what they say.

Transparent Aluminum - Star Trek Technology is now Real

Wait, if the material is actually a mixture of aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen - "also known as Alon" (about which I've posted before)- then it's really a ceramic not a metal at all.

I feel a little mislead by this obvious click-bait title.