I apologize for the narration of The Mat Sci Guy. His voice certainly lacks those nice, pear-shaped tones that are so valuable on the radio - or maybe he just needs a better microphone or a decongestant or processing software.
But...his content is interesting and educational, well laid out and thoroughly researched, so I recommend watching the video but maybe not showing it in class.
Today's video sees him exploring the formation, properties, and applications of aerogels in their various forms.
I'm thrilled that I know something about sol-gel chemistry from a summer of research I did at Miami University some twenty five years ago. I wasn't making aerogels, but I did spend the summer making sol-gels and exploring their applications in chromatography columns.
I also have a little experience with aerogels...or at least I did until my favorite coworker shattered my large sample. Now I have multiple, smaller samples.
The first four minutes or so of this video are about the economics of 3d printing with metal and why it is - for now, anyway - restricted mostly to just prototyping rather than mass production.
Then there's a bit of coverage about testing 3d printed parts - particularly in fatigue strength - as compared to traditional machined parts and a bit of explanation as to why their fatigue strengths tend to be significantly lower - including a micrograph exploration of metals while they are sintered . It's surprising to me that there isn't - at least shown - an example of a sintered piece of metal being tested.
Overall, the video is a nice exploration of why mass produced engines will likely not be made by 3d printing experts in the immediate future.
That's my first takeaway from watching these videos of young people doing amazing things to better their world and decrease the pollution and waste around them.
At 3:05, the creator states that, "this is the lowest carbon footprint way of making a tile," but I'm curious about that. I've come to understand that cement is a very carbon-intensive material, requiring large amounts of carbon dioxide to be released as the calcium carbonate raw material is heated to produce the calcium oxide for the cement.
I love the grey/black/white color scheme of the tiles. I'd happily buy those tiles.
The squishy black mess looks really gross, but I'm impressed at the ingenuity of turning the coconut husk waste into a usable fuel that can replace wood.
Anything that can be done to get rid of waste in landfills is a good thing.
This is another overly long video that is filled with a massive amount of science in all sorts of disciplines: physics, material science, chemistry, engineering, mechanics.
The video sees the Real Engineering host, Brian McManus, visit SpinLaunch's centrifuge being built to launch satellites into space primarily via kinetic energy rather than through rocket fuel combustion...which sounds totally bonkers but might work out.
One of the main technologies here involves a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer tether. At 3:00 that concept is explored with a laminated carbon fiber reinforcement mock-up of the thickness that they need the tether to be to hold the millions of pounds of force that would be necessary.
Then - 8:00 - they look at the need to spin up that tether in a vacuum chamber so that it doesn't melt the carbon fiber from the friction due to air resistance. They also describe how truly low pressure vacuum chamber pumps work and why the SpinLaunch people don't need a vacuum chamber with quite that low a pressure. The idea of outgassing from the metallic parts - 10:25 - was amazing to me. It makes sense to me that there would be small amounts of oxygen gas 'dissolved' in any steel parts, but I had certainly never thought about it before. It's an equilibrium problem, I guess, as oxygen is removed from the atmosphere around the part.
At 16:20 they take a look at the challenges of opening a low pressure chamber at near vacuum to the atmospheric pressure outside without destroying the chamber inside when the air rushes in. They've used a pairing of mylar layers that are broken through and two incredibly quick closing doors.
From 21:30 they explain how they address and minimize vibrations - especially once the payload is let go, leaving a highly unbalanced weight on the arm.
The next section - from 26:45 - they look into the ballistic coefficient of the projectile and why a heavier vehicle might be better for their launch process - something that is very well against the traditional method of launch's goals. With rockets, lighter is better. With the SpinLaunch, heavier and denser is somewhat better because it allows the projectile to gain more momentum without corresponding drag and heating due to friction with the lower atmosphere.
The whole process is fascinating, and I'm hopeful that it turns out to be feasible because I would love to see a full scale SpinLaunch facility built and functioning - for the science and novelty if for nothing else.
This is NOT another post about Naica's crystal cave in Mexico. I've already posted a few of those.
This post is about the Pulpí Geode, supposedly the world's largest geode, found near the town of Pulpí, Spain.
The crystals are - like those in Naica's cave - gypsum, and they're admittedly not as large as those in Naica's cave. In the above video, they refer to the Naica crystals as being up to 15m in length and those in the Pulpí Geode as being up to 2m in length. In the video, however, they state - without much explanation - that the Pulpí Geode is a geode - a cavity in rock completely covered with crystals - and the Naica cave as not a geode.
I don't know if that means the Naica cave just has some un-covered surfaces or what, but the video above doesn't go into that detail, admittedly.
But this cave is available for people to walk through - for now, anyway - whereas Naica is flooded again. You just need to get to Pulpí.
Every time I watch any of the Business Insider videos (and I know I've been posting a lot of them of late - blame the YouTube algorithm for recommending them and BI for making them fascinating), I'm tempted to buy one of the item. It's not that I need an aranmula kannadi in any way. It's just that I find the process fascinating and want to reward the craftspeople who still make things by hand.
There's not a ton of material science here, but it does show a far less industrial version of casting an alloy.
Interestingly they don't seem to mix the alloy components (mainly tin and copper but a trade secret as to the proportions and actual ingredients) other than in turning the molten metal upside down into the mold. I would be very curious to see if the mirror had a homogeneous composition throughout.
It's also fascinating to me to think of this process being developed bit by bit over centuries. Small steps like the cooling of the mold with mud, the covering of the mold in carbon to fill in microscopic pores, and onward must have been done at some point by trial and error and kept in the process when they worked - assumedly discarded from the process when they didn't work - and I wonder how much of the process is like cooking a turkey.
It's always good to see somebody turning toxic waste into something useful and doing some good for the environment in the process, but it's pretty clear that unless they scale this up to massive size, they're never going to be making more than a drop in the acid mine drainage (AMD) coming out of even this one mine in southeastern Ohio.
I'm kind of tempted to buy their paints even though I don't paint. I guess I'd give it to one of my art teachers and let them use it with their students. I just want to help out the cause in a little way even. I guess I could donate, but I can't figure out how to do that from John Sabraw's webpage. He says you can donate to it, but I can't find the choice he says to make in the drop down.
Today's video isn't really all that special. There isn't much revolutionary here, but it's the first in a series about rust and corrosion that Grady has announced and that I'm looking forward to because his garage demos are consistently outstanding. He does show us some bolts in oxygen-rich salt water with time lapse corrosion rolling along.
I'm looking forward to what he has coming in later installments.
This project is just a different application of our in-class demonstration of inflating a milk jug using that same heat gun, but here once the HDPE jug is softened, it gets molded around a somewhat-heat-resistant skull and cooled to hold that new shape
Sound like a fun idea - and very appropriate for the spooky season that we find ourselves in.
There's no info posted with this video...none at all.
The original was posted to reddit (in a subreddit to which I'm not going to link because of the problematic title), and there wasn't any info there, either.
I do appreciate that the two gents (I'm assuming gents, though I could be wrong) are in full PPE...
Mark Wahlberg apparently needs to step up his forging game.
Today's video has Neil Kamimura looking at forging and blacksmithing scenes from movies and commenting on their authenticity.
Iron Man - RDJ is a heck of an actor, but it's weird that he's banging on cold steel when he's got a hot forge right behind him. And how does steel that's not hot enough to glow actually sizzle in the water?
Rambo - At least the steel's hot here. Sly should use a heavier hammer and hit the center of the anvil. Not a believable scene.
Game of Thrones - Not a good sign that the sword's handle comes off so easily. The container that's melting the sword would have to be hot enough to glow if it's making the sword glow. Surface casting is pretty but isn't how it's really done. They also seem to have broken the law of conservation of mass.
Avengers: Infinity War - At least they used an actual mold not just surface casting. Kinda cool that the two pieces forge welded instantly...that's not s'right.
Infinite - Mark Wahlberg need to hit harder and shouldn't wear a glove on his hammer hand. His sword is all wavy and not done. "Swords do not cut pipe."
LoTR: Return of the King - Flux looks pretty when you smack it. Might as well start from scratch not try to repair the blade. And the elf actors don't know what they're doing.
Conan the Barbarian - Still surface casting with all sorts of pretty flames for the appearance and bad quenching.
A Knight's Tale - Hit it harder, girl.
Ragnarok - Get your metal hotter, gents...and improve your aim.
Apparently the forging scenes in movies are pretty crappy.
Concrete is great in compression, very strong stuff.
Concrete isn't so good in tension, however, so using any concrete slab in such a way that it will experience bending load - as a cantilever, for example, or a flooring slab with a long span - requires something to address that weakness in tension.
The most common solution is simple rebar...but then there's the prestressed option.
In the above video - the first in a series of twelve Shay Murtagh videos exploring prestressed concrete beams in great depth - explains what prestressed concrete is and why it's strong than just reinforced concrete.
I always like to open these posts with a joke or pun of some sort, but I couldn't come up with one for this video that wouldn't be a stretch, so I'll just get cracking.
The inherent simplicity of a tensile test - just stretch a material specimen - belies the actual complexity present in performing one carefully and repeatably.
Today's video shows the care that must be taken to perform a tensile test according to industry standards - ASTM D638, in this case - and the stress/strain curve that results from a properly conducted test.
In case you were curious what this whole "ASTM" standard was about, check out this video about the ASTM organization.
We draw wires in the ASM summer materials science camp, but nothing that we do in camp remotely approaches this level of professionalism.
In terms of drawing a wire, we're an introductory art student, and the Harrison Spinks folks are Picasso.
See, 'cause they can draw wires better than we can.
Get it...Picasso...because he's an artist...he did drawings.
In all seriousness, seeing the very clean, seemingly safe process shown above makes me appreciate the less careful process for a similar result shown below.
I feel like I've posted about Glass Half Full before, but I can't find the post.
Maybe I've just meant to post about them because I think they're just about the coolest folks around.
I like to think of myself as a decently environmentally friendly person. I recycle and compost and all that, but I feel like an utter slacker compared to these folks.
[T]he plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable. This campaign is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s efforts to convince smokers that filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.
For me, the big payoffs in this video come from the high speed videography at 2:30 and again at 5:20. Seeing the composite hockey stick flex and store up energy then spring forward even ahead of the player's hand when that stored energy is release is just gorgeous and shows the advantages of composite materials in sports as compared to older, wooden sticks.
Plus, I'm down for just about any video that Destin posts.
According to English Language & Usage Stack Exchange, it's primarily materials science because material science already meant something else when the field of study came into being in the 1910s.
In an answer submitted by user Peter Shor...
It's materials science because material is also an adjective. The phrase material science, as opposed to, say, spiritual science, was used before people started studying the science of materials. Consider this Ngram:
If you search in Google Books for "material science" before 1910, you get hits like
What does material science know about things of the soul?
The world of spirit outside material science.
Material science takes up the objects of the world and interprets them.
Presumably, the science of materials was named materials science to avoid confusion with this phrase.
I don't know what Peter Shor's bona fides are, but it sounds like a good answer to me.
This video didn't answer the question I was thinking it would. I was thinking it would go through the economics of why the Concorde no longer flies. Instead it went through the failure analysis following the only fatal Concorde crash, that of Air France 4590 on July 25, 2000. That does appear, however, to have been the nail in the coffin of the Concorde's commercial life.
The first five or so minutes of the video introduce the crash and the beginning analysis. At 5:00, then, the first clues emerge in the form of a sound recording of a burst tire and a remnant of irregularly-drilled metal strapping among the wreckage. At 10:00, the materials testing gets into fracture mechanics to determine how and when the fuel tank ruptured.
This might not be the best video to watch if you have a fear of flying, but it's fascinating to see how much can be discovered from how little was recovered.
The video description posted by Dave Rondot with the above version of the Turbo Encabulator video is worth reading.
This is the first time Turbo Encabulator was recorded with picture. I shot this in the late 70's at Regan Studios in Detroit on 16mm film. The narrator and writer is Bud Haggert. He was the top voice-over talent on technical films. He wrote the script because he rarely understood the technical copy he was asked to read and felt he shouldn't be alone. We had just finished a production for GMC Trucks and Bud asked since this was the perfect setting could we film his Turbo Encabulator script. He was using an audio prompter referred to as "the ear". He was actually the pioneer of the ear. He was to deliver a live speech without a prompter. After struggling in his hotel room trying to commit to memory he went to plan B. He recorded it to a large Wollensak reel to reel recorder and placed it in the bottom of the podium. With a wired earplug he used it for the speech and the "ear" was invented. Today every on-camera spokesperson uses a variation of Bud's innovation. Dave Rondot (me) was the director and John Choate was the DP on this production. The first laugh at the end is mine. My hat's off to Bud a true talent.
Assuming all that is true - and the Wikipedia history matches the description as does a cNet article - then the above video is the first on-screen appearance of the Turbo Encabulator.
"To replace the UK (not the UK) 31.5 million gasoline cars will require 236,000 tons of lithium carbonate." ~ quote from about 1:00 in the above video.
That would - again, according to the video - require all the world's output for 9 months.
And that metal comes from some countries with awful human rights records and workers' protections.
Then, if we mine the US's lithium, we have to use up water and leach arsenic into the water supply of Nevada...and dig into land holy to Native Americans...and destroy habitat for endangered animals.
Grady is back to school us about those tiny 'sparks' that flew away from the launch pad when SpaceX's rocket launched in November 2020.
Apparently the concrete that SpaceX uses for their launch pad isn't quite the same as the concrete that sits as the walkway outside my classroom window.
Grady explains what concrete is (hydrated crystals) and then tests two types of concrete exposed to three heat environments (room temp, home oven, and propane torch) under compression strength tests.
Not shockingly, the heated concretes broke at way less force.
He then goes on to explain how most of this weakness is caused by our old nemesis: thermal expansion.
At this point, I'm fully in any time AlphaPhoenix releases a video. He explains material science beautifully.
In today's video he explains the differences between crystalline and amorphous (2:30), shows crystalline aluminum under an SEM (3:45), shows how 2-d magnetic discs when agitated spontaneously produce order (5:00-10:30 - the real money portion of the video), and uses a computer simulation to extend this into the third dimension (11:45).
This is a wonderful exploration of how crystals grow - whether they're our copper (II) sulfate crystals in class or cooling aluminum crystals or any other crystals.
Glass is a super-cooled liquid. - amorphous vs crystalline vs liquids
Plastic water bottles release dioxins when frozen. - Ok, I hadn't heard this one. I'd heard about leeching at high temps.
Stainless steel is non-magnetic. - Some are, some aren't. Ferrite and martensite are magnetic...austenite are non-magnetic. Most (but not all) stainless steels are austenite.
Spider silk is stronger than steel. - interesting discussion of 'strength' and 'toughness'
Radioactive metals glow green. - I knew this one...though some do glow blue
I assume the TheCrafsMan isn't really a felt puppet with a bad soul patch and an oddly affected, slow-paced, Cajun accent.
Then again, in my briefresearch of TheCrafsMan I can't find anything to say that he isn't that puppet somehow magically brought to life like a golem.
His projects a decently involved, however, so unless you've been doing some injection molding already, you - like me - might not be ready to step right up to this level of crafsing.
On the last pre-exam school day of the 2021-22 school year, I allowed my students to ask me anything they wanted (as long as it was school appropriate). I got questions ranging from 'can I leave my exam early if I finish?' and 'how did you choose your college?' and 'what's your favorite color?
One student, however, asked me if I knew what perfluoroctanoic acid was. I asked if that was one of the PFAS's, and he said it was involved in making teflon.
I told them that I thought the two biggest challenges their generation - and their children's generations, too - would have to deal with were going to be global warming and polymers. I went on to explain some of the challenges we have with polymers: massive waste, non-biodegradability, absorption into our bodies, mimicking of hormones in our bodies, increased petroleum dependence, and on and on and on.
It wasn't the most chipper discussion I've had with my students.
Luckily, many folks are trying to do something about those problems.
In summer camp and in our material science course at Princeton, we demonstrate this concept - that different portions of a flame produce different temperatures and different results - on a single copper sheet with one torch. We move the torch nearer to and further from the sheet and see reduction or oxidation.
Clearly, the video up top was made by someone who understands all this - maybe understands the science of it but certainly understands the practicality of it because Phoenix Flame Art (by Brent Artman - natch) uses the flame to produce some stunningartwork by preferentially oxidizing and reducing copper sheets.
That's so cute...and it explains polymerization pretty well (initial creation of radicals via UV exposure, radicals breaking C=C bonds to create more radicals, eventual termination by 'meeting' another radical)...and it references Eric Carle's classic book.
Thanks to @diflourine for creating this and allowing it to be shared in classes.
Lamberts-Glass is glass with a soul. We are the only manufacturer in Germany who still uses traditional methods to produce window glass: Mouth-blown glass is worked into flat panels in a complex procedure. We even manufacture coloured glass, so-called ‘streaky glass’ or ‘flashed glass’, by hand.
Our manufacturing methods result in glass with a specific structure, making it particularly suitable for use in historic preservation or glass art.
So I guess they use traditional methods because it produces traditional glass with all the beauty and flaws that would create.
Whatever their reasons, the results are stunningly beautiful, especially in their standard and unique flashed glass panels.
I am, admittedly, thoroughly enamored with the beauty of the Lambert glass. If anybody wants to drop a few bucks, I wouldn't reject a gift of the Lambert sample box with 250 samples of their glass. I don't have any reason to own it, and I have no idea what I'd do with it other than pull the samples out and hold them up to a really sunny window from time to time. But I want it.
I'll throw a few more videos after the jump. Today we'll focus on their handblown plate glass. Tomorrow I'll come back with videos of their craftsmen making other products.
This video takes full advantage of gorgeous images of fire and smelting from a steel refinery - even timed and slo-mo'ed to match the pace of the accompanying music - then follows that steel through the factory as it's turned into a barbell.
Honestly there's not much teaching going on here. It's just really nicely edited footabge of manufacturing.
There's a part of me that looks at this video's tour guide like he's from the Parks and Rec Grizzyl offices. I know he's probably brilliant - his wikipedia article certainly suggests so - but it's like Dr Derek is getting a tour around a rocket factory from a teenager.
This is another video where I spent much of the time with my mouth agape once I realized how revolutionary this method of production could be if they get all the hiccups worked out. The process seems like an extreme of the 'build it fast and wrong, then build it again and better' style of prototyping and manufacturing.
If you have the time, compare this video in which rockets bodies and engine parts are 3d printed from aluminum and alloys to the old-school rocket manufacturing tour from Smarter Every Day. I don't know which is better, but they show radically different approaches.
Coincidentally, I'm going to be in Helensburgh, Scotland in about a month and a week (from when this posts on 4/25/22, anyway). My wife and I are hiking the John Muir Way, a 134-mile path from west to east across the narrow 'waist' of Scotland. Maybe I'll check out the house from the video.
I find myself in an odd little focus on conservation videos of late. In the above video, Tom Scott looks at the efforts to 'dry' out a cement house from from 1902 designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackintosh's design used Portland cement for the outside, and while it's a fascinating house, it's made from a material that is absolutely not appropriate for the damp Scottish environment.
In trying to dry out the house, they have to dry it slowly. So they have built a giant, roofed box over the house and made the walls from chainmail which keeps raindrops off the house but allows the water vapor to leave and the air and bees to come through for the 'fifteen years it'll take to dry out and repair" the house. Plus they've put in walkways and gantries that turn the house into a tourist attraction. Brilliant plan there, National Trust.
Not that we ever entirely went away, but the in-person versions of the ASM Materials Science camp for teachers in back for the summer of 2022.
If you need a little convincing that the summer camps are awesome - easily the best professional development that I've ever taken - check out the stories and testimonials that I've posted on the blog in the past.
The camps start in early June and run through August.
They cost nothing...not a single dime...not a cent.
You'll get to do thirty labs that fit into physical science, life science, material science, middle school science, elementary science, math, English, or even art courses. I can personally say that I've had teacher campers from all of those disciplines.
You'll get to see another thirty or so demonstrations.
You'll get take-home materials to do quite a few of the labs back in your classroom.
You'll get lunch and snacks provided for all five days of camp.
You'll get to visit a local material science either university or industry location and connect with university and industry professionals in your area.
You'll get the opportunity to complete two grad credit hours for $250 at the end of the week.
And if you sign up for the Salt Lake City camp or the Princeton camp or the virtual camp from July 11-15, you'll get to hang out with me either in person or virtually.
I am coming to love Alpha Phoenix's videos more and more with each video. He explores concepts that are often ridiculously subtle until you think about them a little more deeply, and he uses them to explain the details of the materials around us.
In this video he asks how long it would take for a force - a hammer hit in this case - on one end of a bar of steel to be felt on the opposite end of the bar. It's something that seems obvious at first because a push on one end of a steel bar is 'immediately' felt at the other end of the bar. That's true on the scale of a bar a couple of feet long and with the time scale that you and I notice things, but Alpha Phoenix uses far faster measurements than his eyes and proves that the force isn't felt 'immediately' on the other end.
And then he explains why this happens using magnets and springs representing the particles within a solid and does it brilliantly.
Now I just want him to make more of his videos. At his current pace, he's putting out a video a month or so which leads to high quality videos, but I just want more of them.
I love this process...melting (technically it's softening not melting) HDPE on a panini press between parchment paper (they call it greaseproof, but that's parchment in the US) and pressing it into a mold looks like something I could maybe actually do.
So I started collecting lids since the beginning of the year. I don't have nearly enough, though, so I'm going to have to expand my collecting efforts.
Clearly their processing has gotten much, much fancier as the jewelry making video shows. They're on to injection molding, oven melting, and machined aluminum molds.
I'm thinking I'm a ways away from that, but I want to try this next year with my students.
Evolution has reached some pretty outstanding solutions to environmental challenges. It's sort of the ultimate in the fail fast philosophy of engineering. Every mutation is an iteration, and natural selection easily sorts out which designs to pursue. And natural selection has come up with some pretty ingenious solutions.
This video goes through five of those natural solutions and how material scientists are trying to mimic those solutions.
"Sweat gland cement" - looks at cement blends that contain reinforcing fibers and APP-PER-EN. As the temperature of the modified cement rises, the fibers melt (absorbing energy) then the APP-PER-EN foams and releases gasses to put out fires. Weirdly I can't find anything on the web searching for that APP-PER-EN and cement. I'd appreciate a link to more info if anybody can find it.
"Polar bear heating" - considers the white fur/black skin combination of polar bear coats. The black skin absorbs heat allowing them to maximize the absorption of heat energy, even leaving them invisible to infrared cameras. German scientists are using a similar idea to adjust the thermal absorption of heat energy for passive solar heating.
"Homeostasis facades" - are based around muscle fibers expand and contract to regulate heat in the muscles. The facades would be two layers of glass with polymer between them that would expand - blocking sunlight - as they heat up and contract - allowing more sunlight in - as they cool.
"Mantis shrimp cement" - sees Purdue scientists studying mantis shrimp claw material with its linear structure formed in spiral layers that work as crack arresters. The scientists used a 3d printed concrete structure and printed the layers in spirals similar to the mantis shrimp claw material.
"Fish scale glass" - takes a look at laminated glass being made more similarly to how fish scales overlap each others. They etched two layers of laminated glass and laminated them together with the diagonal layers flipped to create a diamond-like pattern that makes the glass much stronger than leaving the etchings in the same direction.
I apologize for the clickbait video and post title today. I didn't write it and am typically loathe to reward anybody who does by pointing out their video.
Today's video tracks us through a glass recycling facility from breaking up the glass, sorting the metal caps and paper labels from the bottles, separating the different colors of glass via optical scanner, and then reusing the glass into glass insulation.
Every step seems so simple, and the host even points out that human hands rarely touch the glass on the way through the sorting and recycling factory. That's impressive to me.
Last week I said I was going to check out what else the Mat Sci Guy had posted, and I found the above video explaining the stress-strain curve 'with a paperclip'.
Again, be warned, his narration is less than exciting, and the level of science can be a little high for at least my students.
But the explanation of how a paperclip can demonstrate the stress-strain curve is really good. He breaks down the elastic and plastic deformation regions of the curve and explains how those changes are different on an atomic level using two-dimensional diagrams while showing that on a macroscopic level with an extra-, extra-large paperclip.
Oh, and there are fewer corny jokes in this week's video than in last week's. Other than the 'what is a paperclip used for' schtick at the beginning, it's a pretty straight forward video.
The narration in the above video is not done by a professional. The video would be way more enjoyable if it had been, but the content is high quality enough that I'm going to recommend watching it.
You have been warned.
The video is a narrated slide show (aka Powerpoint) explaining why borosilicate is a great material for glass that is going to be heated or cooled rapidly without shattering.
It does have corny jokes (the Mat Sci Aficionado cover, 'A Glass of Ice and Fire', for example) and some serious chemistry on the atomic scale (the Leonard-Jones scale, coordination numbers), but the video is worth a watch - for the teacher if not maybe for the student, at least not the students in the material science course at Princeton.
The video, by the way, is good enough that I'm going to check out what else The Mat Sci Guy has posted on his YouTube channel.
Transparent aluminum - famously from Star Trek IV and about which I have posted previously - is fairly well bunk. It's just a version of alumina.
Transparent wood, on the other hand, is a bit closer to being what its name purports to be.
It's wood from which one polymer - lignin - has been removed and replaced with another polymer. Depending on the replacing polymer, the final product 'wood' can have very different properties even becoming fairly transparent.
In fact, there aren't even any words in the video - either recorded diegetic or narrated after the fact.
Instead, we just get some stunningly gorgeous raku pottery from an outdoor kiln.
We can see the fully oxidized, green of the copper glaze and the stunning, reduced copper after the quench.
The Clay Collective published three videos. I've put the prettiest one up above, but the other two are worth seeing, as well. 'Round 3' shows them setting up the kiln initially, and 'Round 2' shows pieces that didn't get nearly the reduction that they got in the video above (assumedly, 'Round 1').
I'm willing to watch just about the most mundane bit of nothing if it's being done in space because nothing happens in space the same way that it happens here on the surface of Earth.
On Earth, two metals put next to each other stay fairly distinct from each other. (I don't want to hear about your dendritic growth causing shorts.)
In space, however, metals spontaneously weld to each other if the metals are in close enough contact because any sort of oxide layer - immediately formed here on Earth pretty much no matter how well we polish the two surfaces - simply doesn't form. As Dr Derek paraphrases from Richard Feynman's lecture, "when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to 'know' that they are in different pieces of [metal]."
Seriously, space is so totally foreign to our experiences.
The challenge of balancing conservation versus commerce is ages old and not getting any simpler.
Whether it was the desires of companies to harvest timber in the Pacific Northwest running into conservationists attempts to protect the spotted owl in the 1990s or the more modern concerns of lithium miners who see the Nevada desert as a 'gold' mine running afoul of lovers of Tiehm's buckwheat which, according to a cnn.com article, "grows on 10 acres in... Southwest Nevada... and... can grow nowhere else in the world", the concerns are infinitely more complicated than they first appear.
The environmental side of me says that we need lithium. We need it because that's one of the keys to shifting from internal combustion to electric vehicles.
But is it worth the extinction of a single species to accomplish that?
Man, it's not my place to say, but it's not as easy a question as it might at appears to be to some on either side of the question.
A few years back I remember reading an article comparing the initial energy deficit that a rechargeable made for a hybrid car like a Prius compared to a Hummer (a stereotypically environmentally unfriendly vehicle).
I haven't been able to find that article which - from my admittedly distant memory - stated that a Prius would have to be driven for a year and a half before it made up the initial energy deficit from the purification of elements in its rechargeable battery allowed it to catch up to a Hummer which took less energy to source its components.
I have, however, found a couple of articles that address similar concerns around the battery problem with electric vehicles. Creating batteries - particularly modern, high performance batteries - requires sourcing easily oxidized elements such as lithium, purification that requires massive amounts of energy output. Those batteries, sadly, aren't eternal and eventually have to be replaced and recycled.
And there's the rub. What to do with those batteries once they're spent?
I've frequently mentioned the ASM Materials Camps for teachers (returning in-person for summer 2022, hopefully near you). In pre-pandemic times I taught a few of them in person each summer. Over the past couple of years I've taught a couple of them virtually each summer.
But not only am I a camp leader, I'm also a camp taker. I took the first and second year camps a decade or so ago, and I've taken a couple of their specialty camps in the summer since. I took a corrosion camp at the University of Akron and - last summer - a camp on sustainable materials online.
One of the major focuses of the sustainability camp was the concept of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This process looks at a product's impact on the environment from source (mining, drilling, growing, whatever) to disposal (reuse, recycling, or simply landfilling). The process can become incredibly detailed - to a level well beyond the day or two we spent discussing the LCA in our camp - but can also be done at an introductory level for middle or high school materials students.
If you want to take a look at some very in-depth LCAs, here are some links to documents comparing various grocery bags (the cliched 'paper or plastic?' debate).
The phrase 'vegan spider silk' seems weird in a dozen different ways, but I understand that scientists described in the video are using plant-sources proteins to assemble a polymer similar to those in spider silk.
And if they can find a way to make single-use plastic products home compostable - which this video and various articles (links below) claim they have - then they've made something really useful. I would love if I could throw my various plastic materials into the compost bin and have them actually break down in a reasonable amount of time.
Admittedly, the four-year jar of trash seems ridiculously daunting to me. My wife and I have tried to minimize our waste, but we're nowhere near that level of trash minimization.
I do appreciate the complaint about the government allowing companies to sell single use materials and containers without having a way to recycle their product where they're selling it. I'm liberal enough that I'm fully okay with the government instituting regulations to change that because I think it's pretty clear that the free market isn't ever going to fix our environmental problems. (Sorry, I'll step off of my soapbox and get back to the material science. I'm thinking I might need to start decreasing my leanings into the post-consumer side of material science in my blogging.)
This video looks at some effects of California's regulations on carbon taxing and a cap on carbon emissions. Turns out that regulating things like carbon emissions isn't bad for business because it's good for people patronizing those businesses.
s look like polystyrene and now I cannot unsee it."
