"All you need to do is melt some sugar."
Yeah, there's a lot more than that involved in making sugar glass.
You need to make sure the 'glass' remains amorphous so it stays translucent - which is is a little tougher than it seems.
And the sugar shouldn't actually be sucrose but rather isomalt.
...and the stuff you make isn't exactly safe to break across a friend's head.
Not a lot of science presented in that first video, so let's try another one.
Sugar glass itself isn't the solution to single use plastics.
It's too brittle and too water soluble.
But it sounds like the composite of sugar glass (isomalt) and sawdust - particularly with a waterproof coating - might be a promising possibility.
I absolutely adore the St Louis arch - technically The Gateway Arch - and have been to the top at least a half dozen times. If I had my druthers, I would get to the top every time I'm in St Louis, but my wife and mother-in-law are less interested, so I merely admire it crossing the bridge each time we're in town.
One of our campers in Boise this summer explained that she had a lesson in her science class about the final topping-out ceremony of the arch, it being interesting because one side was in more direct sun. This lead to that sun side expanding more than the other, causing the two legs not to initially line up and the gap for the keystone to be too narrow if not for the hydraulic jacks installed to spread the legs apart.
Check out the details in the above video at 0:50 and in from the Arch's wikipedia article...
It was slated to be inserted at 10:00 a.m. local time but was done 30 minutes early because thermal expansion had constricted the 8.5-foot (2.6 m) gap at the top by 5 inches (13 cm). To mitigate this, workers used fire hoses to spray water on the surface of the south leg to cool it down and make it contract. The keystone was inserted in 13 minutes with only 6 inches (15 cm) remaining. For the next section, a hydraulic jack had to pry apart the legs six feet (1.8 m). The last section was left only 2.5 feet (0.76 m). By noon, the keystone was secured.
Brilliant, man. hose down the hot side with cold water.
How cool is that?
I'm sorry...I know...it's a corny joke...but it was right there...I couldn't help myself...
A month or so ago, my wife brought home an Indestructibles book. She'd picked it up from our local Target store as a baby shower gift for a coworker and said it was made of a neat material that didn't rip.
I asked if it was Tyvek, knowing that Tyvek is a rip-stop fabric. She, a successful Appalachian Trail thru-hiker knows Tyvek as a lightweight ground cloth, and she said she wasn't sure whether the books were Tyvek or not.
So off I went on an internet hunt...
What are Indestructibles made of that is so durable yet paperlike and delightful for my baby?
Indestructibles are printed on a synthetic material made from flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers (getting technical here, we know). It feels like paper, but liquid water cannot pass through it and it is very difficult to tear.
Flashspun fabric is a nonwoven fabric formed from fine fibrillation of a film by the rapid evaporation of solvent and subsequent bonding during extrusion.
Tyvek (/ˈtaɪ.vɛk/) is a brand of synthetic flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers. The name Tyvek is a registered trademark of the American multinational chemical company DuPont, which discovered and commercialized Tyvek in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Tyvek's properties—such as being difficult to tear but easily cut, and waterproof against liquids while allowing water vapor to penetrate—have led to it being used in a variety of applications.
waterproof...liquid water cannot pass through it...difficult to tear but easily cut...very difficult to tear...flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers...flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers
