It's tough to repair a building that is a single piece of material.
That's the short answer to the rhetorical question posed in the video's title, though the host goes into a lot more detail than that simple sentence.
He also explains that making a house out of a single material defeats the purpose of using different materials on the inside (drywall, for example) and outside (bricks or siding, for example) of the house; that no single material will work for walls, doors, and windows necessitating the merging of the 3d printed materials with some sort of additional structure for those features, partially defeating the advantages of 3d printing; and the 3d printed house's size is restricted by the size of gantry on which the 3d printer moves.
I subscribe to Stewart Hicks's channel, primarily covering architecture and focusing on the Chicagoland area with a frequent highlighting of Frank Lloyd Wright's work. Most of the videos aren't on material science but rather on the architecture.
A few years back I took a workshop from the American Ceramic Society and got a free Materials Science Classroom Kit.
The workshop was a bit of a bust because of a minor snowstorm that kind of cancelled the workshop even though half the participants still showed up, and the presenters did a game job of presenting the workshop as best they could with their limited staff and attendees.
In case you'd thought about getting this kit or taking the workshop, I thought I'd run through what you get for $249 (seriously, that's the price as of my posting of this info.)
The box contains...
package of 60 bobby pins
propane torch top
5 small C clamps (maybe 2")
20' rolls of nichrome and copper wire
alligator clips with wires
string
small electronic balance
6" of nitinol wire
6" of steel wire
100mL beaker
plastic cups
hole punch
rubber-coated beaker tongs
dust mask
plastic measuring spoons
disposable pipets
four LEDs
two piezoelectric discs
two piezoelectric polymer films
3 each glass rods (soda lime, borosilicate, and fused silca)
hot or not (putting a torch to the refractory brick and showing the it doesn't transmit heat well)
candy fiber pull (melting jolly ranchers in the beaker and pulling it to make 'glass' fibers)
piezoelectric materials (lighting the LEDs by bending or tapping the piezoelectric materials)
shape memory alloys (demonstrating steel wire and nitinol wire both going into hot water)
thermal shock (heating the three types of glass rods and plunging them into cold water)
glass bead on a wire (making borax glass on copper and nichrome wires with a torch)
engineered concrete (cement pucks in styrofoam bowls with student-chosen reinforcements)
thermal processing of bobby pins (heat treating bobby pins)
How strong is your chocolate (doing 3-point bend tests by hanging plastic cups with weights [pennies are suggested] from various chocolate candy bars)
A textbook The Magic of Ceramics (currently $60 at Amazon)
The labs are solid labs, though I will say that many of them will seem very familiar to anyone who has attended our ASM summer workshops. (Note that I'm not claiming any sort of copying but rather than both programs have some similar DNA to them, likely coming from labs that some teachers have done in classrooms for years. Heck, the kit is endorsed by a quote from our very own Andy Nydam:
"The lessons are some of the most well-written lessons I’ve seen in the industry. They are truly great and valuable for all science teachers!"
I'll admit that I'm not sure the materials included are worth $249, particularly because teachers would have to provide a fair bit of - admittedly inexpensive - materials to perform each of the labs. The teacher manual is available online and most of the materials are easy enough to source (the nitinol, nichrome, piezoelectric film and discs, borosilicate and silica glass, and space shuttle tile would be the only ones that aren't available from Walmart or a big box hardware store). As to whether those materials are rare enough to you for the $249 price tag is up to you.
The lab manual is available online (link up above), and the textbook would be easy enough to find at a decent library. The consumable materials are also available in their replacement materials kit for just $80 and includes most of the tougher-to-source materials (other than the refractory brick).
There is also an option to request a kit grant, but that looks to be more about running a program where you need multiples of either this kit or the mini materials kit or their glass science kit - neither of which I can speak to as I have no experience with either.
That's going to be a very contemporarily pretty airport.
I don't get the idea of an airport where people will just come to hang out as a community space because I'm thinking that's going to freak out a whole bunch of security folks, but in the long run that's not a materials question, so I'll leave that aside for now.
The mass timber movement seems to go back to basics, using bonded wood from supposedly sustainable forests to build gorgeous buildings. Here's to hoping that it works.
I am both hopeful about and horrified at the prospect of enzymes that will break down plastics.
I'm hopeful because the man-made polymers that we have been creating and covering our world with for decades now are going to have to be broken down somehow, sometime. If decomposers are beginning to be able to process them into harmless - or even beneficial - products, that's great.
...but we have a lot of currently in-use polymers that we don't necessarily want to start breaking down into gray goo just yet.
...and if we find a way to make polymers break down more easily, will that just encourage us to make more of those polymers rather than stopping the production of them sooner?
