Every time I see things like this I am reminded of how fortunate a life I am living.
I don't think it's too radical an idea that we might need to cover some sustainability in our materials science courses. When the limestone from this quarry is being used to make cement and paper and tiles and much more, we might want to rethink whether we actually need to use that much limestone - and if we do, how we might want to pay a little more so that the people who are manning those quarries can actually survive the process.
For those of us of a certain generation think back pretty fondly to Mr Wizard's World on Nickelodeon in the 1980's. Actually, quite a few generations think back fondly to Mr Wizard as Don Herbert started as Mr Wizard in 1951. He's even still being parodied onSNL.
This clip hits two things that we cover in matsci class at Princeton: thermal expansion (like the iron wire sagging) and the bimetallic strip.
In fact, the two wooden splints used to demonstrate the bimetallic strip at 2:00 is just about as brilliant a demonstration of that phenomenon as I've seen. Nicely done, Don.
One of the things that I always try to convey to my chemistry students is that there are more jobs in - or just adjacent to - chemistry other than chemist or chemical engineer, and most of them need a good grounding in chemistry to be able to do the job well.
Whether you're the chemistry lab manager, the salesperson at a chemical company, the quality control technician at a steel mill, or a glassblower for a chemistry department, you need to know something about the chemicals that you're working with or the chemistry labs for which your product will be used.
Today we'll look at a few scientific glassblowers. I picked some of the best ones I could find on YouTube, but there are dozens and dozens more profiles of the scientific glassblowers at various universities around the world.
I stumbled upon the above video in searching for totally different ceramic stuff on YouTube, but I was immediately taken by the magnetic stalactites that the artist is creating in the video still.
He mentions in the video that he creates them by using a magnetic clay of his own devising between two super-strong magnets.
Then the video goes through him using his ceramic as an electrode - which inherently doesn't make sense to me since ceramics are naturally non-conductive - in what appears to be a copper (II) sulfate solution and using a current to grow copper crystals on the ceramics.
Then the gold, pocked inner surface of other ceramic bowls showed up, and I was blown away with the beauty.
So I went searching the guy out to see just how much one of his pieces would cost me - assuming fully that I wasn't going to be able to afford it.
We didn't used to need nearly as much lithium as we do now, and we're going to need way more lithium going forward because lithium is used to make pretty much every high tech battery - like those in electric vehicles. Those batteries need a whole lot of lithium.
I've posted about the one lithium mine in the United States and how it's running into conflicts with environmentalists over the destruction of habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat.
Today's article from NPR - which also has a 7-minute audio story in case you had some students who would be helped by reading along - shows some photos from the aforementioned Silver Peak mine in Nevada and explores other possible sources of lithium including seawater and geothermal power plant brine.
