There are certain properties of glass that make this a single-use GLASS FLIPBOOK, namely it's brittleness.
At room temperature, glass is inherently not flexible or workable.
Even the willow glass that our intrepid YouTuber uses in today's video is fragile when bent - less so than normal sodium lime glass would be, but still pretty fragile.
I know what you were wondering: where are all the summer material science teacher camps in 2024?
Well, wonder no more. Here is where they all are.
If you don't know what I'm talking about - first, I'm not sure how you found your way to this blog because I think this is just about the only way people find this blog...second, check out the videos about the camp that I've posted before.
If you're wanting to sign up for one of these camps, head on over to the ASM Education Foundation website and sign the heck up!
In our material science class at Princeton - and in most of the matsci classes that originated from the ASM summer camps, I would imagine - we grow copper (II) sulfate crystals from solution.
It's a fairly easy lab to do, and the students have a high success rate.
For most students, that crystal growing experience is an end, but for others it's just a beginning, a taste of a much richer world of crystal growth.
For those students, crystalverse would be a great resource as it provides instructions for the diy crystal farmer whether they want to grow crystals of copper acetate, monoammonium phosphate, sucrose, alum, sodium chloride, potassium ferrioxalate, or even pyramidal crystals of sodium chloride.
In every case, the procedure is largely the same - make a solution, let the solution cool and evaporate to form seed crystals, continue to let the solution evaporate to grow the seed crystals larger. The great things about the crystalverse website is that it has loads of tips and faqs to help you troubleshoot your growing.
Today you get a whole bunch of videos about making salt (all different from previous salt making videos.)
It seems like such a simple thing - talk salt water from the ocean and boil it down - but there's a lot more to the science of making salt including removing the calcium and magnesium impurities, allowing the crystals to grow to the desired size, and sorting those different crystal sizes.
Who knew that the rate of crystal growth would affect the size of the crystals?
More after the jump...
