Making an atomic trampoline

I've said it before, but an atomic trampoline demonstration set-up would make for a spectacular gift for your favorite neighborhood blogger.

NileRed took a different route than I've taken - which is mostly just wishing that I would stumble across an atomic trampoline and not really doing anything at all to make that happen - and decided to make a disk of amorphous metal on his own.

Admittedly, one of our ASM Master Teachers has a lead on getting sets of amorphous metal disks for us to have in our classrooms. It involves the material scientists at Apple's headquarters in California and turned out to be much more complicated than expected because - as NileRed finds out - the adhesive used to affix the amorphous metal to the steel base is highly relevant in maintaining the ridiculously bouncy nature of amorphous metals in this application.

Here's to hoping that my strategy of doing nothing and just hoping things will work out will...um...work out.

I'll include the Grand Illusions videos that inspired Steve Mould's video that in turn inspired NileRed's above video...

Making concrete green with Dr. Pranshoo Solanki | Illinois Summer Research Academy

I love that this is a week-long research project/workshop for high school seniors. I know that we don't do anything nearly that intensive in our material science course at Princeton - partially because of time constraints and partially because we don't have anything that would test concrete's compression strength with any accuracy.

Does anybody know of similar experiences that near you that we could recommend for our high school students?

How One Company Secretly Poisoned the Planet

At some point in my material science and chemistry courses, I speak bluntly to my students that most research suggests that man-made polymers are bad for us.

Some are worse than others, but most research on the effects of polymers on humans seems to suggest that there are bad effects from most man-made polymers. Some are minorly bad, but others - like the family of PFAS - are more obviously and persistently bad.

The video above is short and has a direct message: DuPont is bad (or has acted badly).

The longer video below - from Veritasium - is far longer but is much, much more informative.

If this sounds familiar, you might've seen a semi-recent movie about this story, Dark Waters.