UCLA's water main break

So, California is in an historic drought. The water situation there is awful...AWFUL.

Check out this map of the state as of October 28, 2014 (sourced here)...

I mention this only because it makes the following video, of a ruptured, 30-inch water main break on UCLA's campus this past July particularly tragic and ironic.





According to an NPR story, the water main took 30 hours to shut off and lost 20 million gallons of water in the process.

For Gorilla Glass testers, every day is a grind (and scratch and drop...)

Glass isn't supposed to do that, the bending thing that the Gorilla Glass in the photo there is doing.

See, glass shatters.

It's inflexible and rigid.

Yeah, it's tough, but it's not gonna bend like that without a catastrophic failure.

Unless it's Gorilla Glass being bent in Corning Lab's testing lab as chronicled in a cnet article recently. In the article (and included video, check below for the embed) we get to hear why sapphire might not be the material destined to replace Gorilla Glass on all of our smartphone fronts anytime soon.

I particularly enjoy this quote...

We put on safety glasses, walked into a restricted corridor and soon entered one of the main labs, which -- despite all the secretiveness -- looks a lot like shop class. 

I can't tell whether I'm entertained more by the thought that anything that's 'just' a shop class can't do any real science or whether I expect the quote to be followed up with photos of guys with three and a half fingers.

As Infrastructure crumbles, trillions of gallons of water lost

My material science students read (and listened to) this NPR story this week, the day after I heard it on the radio. In her written response to the article, one of the students wrote that she was surprised that two water mains that far apart (I'd also shown video of a water main breaking on UCLA's campus this summer) could coincidentally break at the same time. I explained to her that water mains broke every day all around the country. I typed water main break into Google News and came up with hundreds of hits within the last couple of days.

Water mains break all the time. It's a cost of using metal pipes, that they will eventually corrode and crack and turn into pretty spectacular sinkholes and floods.

My students asked why we didn't just use something that wouldn't corrode, like glass.

Apparently I have some work to do when we get to the ceramics chapter.

Coffee Joulies - cool coffee faster

I know what my wife's Christmas gifts are going to be this year. She, admittedly, likes her coffee pretty hot, so I don't know whether that will be the prefect temperature for her, but the science is outstanding.

And that's what matters, right? Whether I find her gift interesting, right?

The Coffee Joulies are filled with a phase changing material that has a transition temperature at whatever appropriately hot coffee is supposed to be. Hopefully it's right.

Amazing chemical reaction between North Korean coin and US quarter

What kind of demonry is this? Our faceless, voiceless, assumedly-hand-modeling demonstrator is able to press one coin through the other without a whole lot of effort.

Luckily their webpage - where the coins are sort of on sale for €35.50 for three coin pairs - says the following about the 'trick':

These coins are made of gallium and indium bearing alloys that when in contact, spontaneously form a non-toxic eutectic (well defined melting point) alloy that is liquid at room temperature!

The above trick, though, seems much quicker and smoother than does the one I've seen before.

They sure don't make pyrex like they used to

We've been hearing for a few years that Pyrex isn't what it used to be, that the quality control from the overseas manufacturing might be a little less strict than that in typical American manufacturing.

And now we know all about it thanks to Theodore Gray's Gray Matter column, which he largely has turned into his two, thoroughly entertaining Mad Science books. I even really like the legal disclaimers from the books (which I sadly can't find online for the linking). Lots of good reading there - along with some pretty spectacular photos of chemical reactions.

What's in your iPhone?

Nothing is in my iPhone. I'm an Android guy, myself.

Hah! These are the jokes, folks.

I love the American Chemical Society's series of videos about the chemistry of a whole lot of different topics: candy, iPhones, fireworks, life hacks, and lots more. Here they go through the numerous different elements used in making a smart phone. I particularly find the molten potassium bath for the screen fascinating.