The Story of Borosilicate Glass: Why Pyrex was Special

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 wood uses orange peel extract to go entirely sustainable

Source - phys.org

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.

Original research publication - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202100559 

More populist article - https://phys.org/news/2019-11-transparent-wood-material-future.html 

A skilled amateur tries to recreate the experiment in his lab...

Raku firing

Not a lot of science in todays' video.

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').

Raku man, who knows what you're gonna get?

Why Metals Spontaneously Fuse Together In Space

There is nothing cooler than space.

Nothing...

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.