To quote my mother anytime we my dad would order pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms, "if God had meant for us to eat fungus, he wouldn't have made it grow on our feet."
I've since moved on from sharing my dad's exact pizza order to one of bacon and banana peppers, but I'm still down with the button mushroom.
But this video certainly isn't about your dad's mushrooms any more than quorn or Ecovative (mentioned in the above video and already blogged about) are.
Today's video looks at a lab exploring the growth of fungus (mycelium) to produce all sorts of different, polymer-substitute materials.
Here's a related TED talk from Erik Klarenbeek (the focus of the middle of the above video).
This article took me a few reads through to get the idea, but here's what I think I have. I'll use quotes from the article...
"[T]he researchers needed to explore the tradeoff between mechanical protection and thermal insulation, properties rooted in a material's molecular structure and orientation."
"Materials with strong mechanical protection, such as metals and ceramics, have a highly ordered and aligned molecular structure. ... Insulating materials, on the other hand, have a much less ordered structure, which prevents the transmission of heat through the material."
" "Our idea was to use this Kevlar polymer to combine the woven, ordered structure of fibers with the porosity of aerogels to make long, continuous fibers with porous spacing in between," said Gonzalez. "In this system, the long fibers could resist a mechanical impact while the pores would limit heat diffusion." "
"[T]he researchers were able to spin long, aligned nanofibers into porous sheets—providing enough order to protect against projectiles but enough disorder to protect against heat."
First off, whoa, there's such a thing as kevlar aerogel?
And B, I think I might need to re-read the article because I kind of went away thinking about what the heck a kevlar aerogel would be.
This is effectively our summer camp demo of the 'happy/sad balls' (available from Ed Innovations as Choositz Decision Balls). They're two polymer balls - one made from neoprene, one from polynorbornene - that look and feel almost identical but that bounce very differently.
Admittedly, The Action Lab (which feels really weird as a term to refer to a dude in a video) doesn't have the same trickster nature that I like to use to demonstrate these balls in class. He's okay, and he explains the science and all, but I would hope that you could find a more entertaining way to demonstrate this in class.
Personally, I like to hand the bouncy ball (the neoprene) to a student and give them a few challenges. Drop and catch the ball...drop and catch with a clap in between...drop and catch with a spin between...(but I take the ball back to 'explain' each step...before returning the ball for the 'drop & spin' step, I switch the balls without telling the student, leading to the polynorbornene landing flatly. I usually tell the student that the ball hit a crack, causing it to bounce oddly while they were spinning. I've gotten students to drop the non-bouncy ball like three times before they start to suspect something - even though most of the rest of the class can tell something is wrong pretty quickly.)
The video up above is clearly pro-Desserto, which is okay because Desserto seems pretty phenomenal.
I wish I was a little less cynical sometimes, because I find myself thinking that Desserto - leather made from cacti - seems too good to be true. The producers take leaves off of cacti - "and then the small [leaves] will grow in a matter of months" - and produce 'leather' from the leaves.
"You get organic, biodegradeable, and durable vegan leather..." for the same cost and less environmental damage than regular leather.
So I went looking for something that looks at Desserto with a more critical eye.
I first found a video showing how a different researcher makes 'plastic' from cactus leaves. It looks like something in the same realm but not quite the same product.
...but man, I'm stumped. I can't find anything that looks at Desserto with a critical eye. I can find a bunch of articles that say it's a new, fantastic product with a lot of buzz about it. But I can't find anything that either explains the process in more detail (not surprising as it's new and likely highly patented) or that explores just how environmentally friendly the vegan 'leather' really is.
I did find leather made from pineapple leaves, though, but it's also from the makers of Pinatex, so it's only pro-pinatex.
If anybody can find a more critical look at either of these materials, please share it.
That's either a really sad ending for a great book or a great repurposing of an awful book.
Either way, that's a book that's been soaked in a borax solution and left to crystalize.
It's kind of cool looking.
I'll let Alexis Arnold describe her own creation, a part of the Crystallized Books series...
The Crystallized Book Series addresses the materiality versus the text or content of a book. The crystals remove the text and solidify the books into aesthetic, non-functional objects. The books, frozen with crystal growth, have become artifacts or geologic specimens imbued with the history of time, use, and memory.
I kind of dig it and might make one of those myself. I can't imagine it would be too tough to make. I already know how to make a borax solution. I assume the soaking isn't too tough. And lord knows I've grown enough borax crystals by just letting the solution evaporate.
