Checkerspot x Autodesk: A Better Future for Snow Sports (and more)

In the summer of 2023, our field trip from the Salt Lake City ASM summer teacher camp was to WNDR / Checkerspot.

When the trip was initially described to me, I thought we were going to see how snowboards and skis are made. I'm not a winter sport guy, so I figured it could be interesting but not necessarily my scene.

When we got there, though, I found that WNDR - the winter sports equipment maker and retailer - wasn't the real business. The real business was Checkerspot, a materials company that was producing polymer raw materials from microalgae as a replacement for petroleum sourcing. 

That company needed some way to demonstrate the utility of their materials, so they found a consumer-focused industry with high margins and a strong environmental conscience among its consumers. In the Salt Lake City area, skiing and snowboarding made sense for them because the final products - the snowboards and skis themselves - are high users of polymers in their composite materials, and the people who buy tend to be willing to spend a little more to buy environmentally friendly products.

The tour was outstanding, and I highly recommend getting to see their process if you're ever out in Salt Lake City. You can see some of their facility in this next video.

Making ULTRA-BRIGHT GLOWING GOO

Barnaby Dixon is an impressive puppeteer that I first heard about probably ten years ago. If you haven't checked out some of his work, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes there first.

In this instructional video, Barnaby explains how he uses a thermoplastic polymer - a polymer that becomes flexible when it's heated above some temperature but is rigid below that same temperature. It's a great example of the polymer's glass transition phase change. Because polymers are mixtures, they don't necessarily have definite melting temperatures as pure substances like elements or compounds do. Instead they have ranges of temperatures during which they aren't quite solid or liquid but are flexible and moldable - think of hot glass being shapeable but not liquid.

I have some of this at school. It used to be available from Educational Innovations. That's where I bought it, but they sadly don't carry it anymore. Of course, just about anything is available at Amazon if you search for pcl moldeable plastic.

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.

How Disc Golf Discs Are Made (MVP Manufacturing Tour) - Smarter Every Day 301

Summer of George!

I do want Destin to get back to making shorter videos like his initial, six-and-a-half-minute Prince Rupert's drops video, but I understand that he's just working to optimize for the algorithm. 

At least the Smarter Every Day videos are quality videos from tip to tail, showing brilliant views and asking questions along the way of the entire manufacturing process.

I learn so much from all of Destin's videos.

And I'm going to get myself some of those MVP discs. 

The worry about black plastic...and a correction

This video was published by Adam Ragusea in November 2024 about a study from a month or so earlier than that. 

The tl;dr of the study is that many black plastics are produced from recycled black plastics that are frequently sourced from electronic waste which contains higher amounts of particularly toxic, flame-retardant chemicals. Those 'new' black plastic items could - especially if used in high heat areas like food flippers and turners on the stovetop - release higher than safe amounts of those chemicals.

In the above video, Adam goes through the possible concerns that this raises as well as noting a possible math error in the study's calculations suggesting that the level of concern is slightly lower than the authors might have initially suggested.

The article was corrected - noting exactly the math error that Adam suggested, and Adam published a spectacular video explaining why that error should not undermine faith in the scientific process or even in the researchers and authors of the original article.

You're Being Lied To About Ocean Plastic | Truth Complex | Business Insider

The widening gyre...

Yes, there's a garbage patch in the center-ish of the Pacific Ocean. 

That garbage patch is not anything worth looking at, though. It's an area of higher than average concentration of plastic waste, but it's not something you could walk across or would have trouble boating through. Even a higher density area isn't necessarily a high density area.

As this video reveals, the most common photos attributed as being of the garbage patch are not of the garbage patch. They're of near-shore, highly polluted areas - which might actually be easier to clean up than the garbage patch would be - if we even should clean it up.

The video goes on to explore the sources of plastic pollution (hint - mostly not littering), the value of recycling (limited but worth doing), the role of big corporations in producing plastic waster (suck it, Coca Cola), the problems with microplastics (bad, very bad), and the need to reduce more than reuse and recycle.

These kinds of videos are way too easy to find on YouTube.

Plastics bad...we need to use less of them.

...and I write that as I sit beside of plastic bottle of Coke Zero Cherry that I'm drinking today.

Can this sugar-based material replace single-use plastics? | All Science. No Fiction.

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.

Indestructible books

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...

On the Indesctructibles FAQ page, I found the following... 

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.

Which then sent me to the wikipedia article on flashspun fabrics...

Flashspun fabric is a nonwoven fabric formed from fine fibrillation of a film by the rapid evaporation of solvent and subsequent bonding during extrusion. 

...and wikipedia links onward to 'see also' Tyvek...

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.

See the parallels between the Tyvek entry on wikipedia and the Indestructibles description?

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

The books might not be made from the branded Tyvek, but it sounds to me like they're made of a generic Tyvek.

I'm going to take that as a win.

The Controversy Behind Nike’s Vaporfly Running Shoe, Explained | WSJ

Anything more than totally naked sporting competition is essentially a materials question.

Wooden tennis racquets gave way (briefly) to aluminum and then to composite racquets.

Wooden baseball bats became aluminum then composites.

Similar progressions took place for pole vaulting and nearly every other sport.

In running, however, the materials question mostly shows up in the running shoes, and Nike's Vaporfly is the current materials leader in that realm.

More videos after the jump...

Meet The Plastic-Eating Worms | Planet Fix | BBC Earth Science

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?

Like Natalie Imbruglia, I am torn.

The life and achievements of chemist Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar

Stephanie Kwolek absolutely belongs in the inventors hall of fame, in the women's hall of fame, on the American Chemical Society's website, and on lots of other lists of honorees.

Stephanie Kwolek, you see, invented Kevlar at DuPont in 1965.

Why Melted Bugs On Candy And Lemons Fuel A $167 Million Industry | Big Business | Business Insider

The process of making shellac is scientifically fascinating, ridiculously complicated, economically important, and ethically questionable.

Like so many products that are 'natural', shellac amazes me because I have absolutely no idea how anyone would have thought to go through this process to turn bug secretions into a furniture sealant, a citrus fruit polish, a candy coating, and so much more.

Self-Healing Material

Self-healing materials could be pretty cool if we get them figured out.

I appreciate the brief dalliance into cold welding between metallic pieces in space - something I've posted about before.

And I appreciate Steve Mould, of course, who sadly keeps his humour (British, natch) mostly in check for this video.

The Most Reflective Mirror In The World

Arrggghhh, Action Lab again.

I want to hunt down some of those dialectric mirrors. Their non-isotropic reflective materials sound pretty cool.

I am amazed that there is no metal in the material. It's just made of transparent polymer layers in alternating materials with different indices of refraction.

How Does Noise-Cancelling Tape Work?

Argh, Action Lab again.

I don't care for the host as a video host, but I do like some of the experiments he gives and the experiments he shows...sometimes.

This video shows noise-damping tape which incorporates a viscoelastic layer to the tape, causing a significant amount of damping for the vibrations in the cookie sheet that Action Lab uses as a frugal gong.

This seaweed packaging could bring an end to single use plastic | RE:TV

Seaweed, eh?

Maybe this one will pay off. I'll admit to being a bit skeptical because I've heard of a number of bio-based polymers that were going to replace plastics with far more environmentally-friendly polymers, and the next one that really works to replace plastics will be - as far as I know - the first one. 

Maybe I'll be seeing their ooho packaging replacing ketchup packets and water bottles sometime soon...maybe...

Is biodegradable better? Making sense of 'compostable' plastics

I think I've made my opinion abundantly clear around here before: we have to stop using plastics.

Manmade polymers are bad for us and for our environment in almost every case.

I say all this from no moral high ground as I'm typing this on a laptop with a plastic case, plastic keys, and assuredly plastic components glued and soldered in ways that make it relatively impossible to recycle.

Today's article - from phys.org - states what seems like a pretty clear and undebatable conclusion: people are confused as to what biodegradable, bioplastic, and compostable mean, and that confusion might lead to even more plastic trash around our world.

Experts on all sides of the biodegradable battleground agree that beyond reducing use, governments need to set up better disposal infrastructure to ensure biodegradable plastics don't end up in oceans and on forest floors.

Preaching to the choir there...

SPNs Might Change the World, So What Are They?

Slow it down, Hank

I worked with a type of hydrogel in my one summer of actual benchtop research at Miami University twenty-some years ago, and I certainly never would have imagined them to have the properties described in today's video. I was just looking at the ability of the get to absorb and subsequently release transition metal ions, so I wasn't exploring their mechanical properties, admittedly.

SPNs, in case you were wondering, are supramolecular polymer networks, networks of polymer chains held together by - according to this video - non-covalent bonds like intermolecular forces like hydrogen bonds.

Halfway through the video, Hank makes a turn to a possible application of a particular SPN that was used to help paralyzed rats to regrow nerve cells and allow them to 'walk' again. That's a long way from human trials, but the initial study sounds amazingly promising.

The Insane Engineering of the Parker Solar Probe

The first 7:53 of this video is all about orbital mechanics - which is interesting, I'll grantcha, but isn't the focus of this blog.

If orbital mechanics is your jam, go play some Kerbel and get back when you reach an expolanet.

We're here to learn about material science, and that's where the video takes a big turn at about 7:55, first exploring the carbon foam composite of the solar shield, itself, and the ceramic, reflective paint on its sun-side.

Then - at 9:15 - we get into the solar probe cup and its measurements of the solar wind. The big issue there is that the cup can't hide behind that carbon-carbon composite shield. It has to survive nakedly in the solar wind at 1400 degrees C which sort of limits the acceptable materials. The conductive mesh is made of acid-etched tungsten, and the wires leading to and from the mesh are a niobium alloy called niobium C-103 (89% Nb, 10% Hf, and 1% Ti) with sapphire bead insulation...you know, as is tradition.

Space is frickin' wild, man.

And that doesn't even get into how we tested those materials - a whole other journey that's covered after 13:55 in the video.

How To Recycle Plastic Bottles Into A Park Bench | Made By Destruction

When I see videos like this I get at least a little hope for the concept of recycling.

In today's video we follow post-consumer HDPE jugs - like a translucent milk jug - through sorting, cleaning, melting, injection molding, and eventual assembly into a park bench.