The Harvard Library That Protects The World's Rarest Colors

Even if we go to the 152-crayon case from Crayola, there are certain colors that we just aren't going to ever get to, and I'm not just talking about blurple.

The chemical composition of colors - maybe pigments would be the better word - turns out to be important in identifying the veracity of recovered artwork. Certain pigments come into and out of fashion over the years, and pigments from paintings of already known provenance can be compared to the paintings of those of unknown provenance.

And there's a museum at Harvard University that keeps samples of more than 2500 historically-important pigments.

Investigators: Boy, 9, injured after glass shower door shatters

That's pretty much what tempered glass is supposed to do right there.

Yes, there may be a quality control issue in that the tempering might be better or worse depending on the production mechanics and controls, but that view of shattering into multiple small pieces is what's supposed to happen with tempered glass.

Ideally, those pieces would be smaller than some of those we see in the video, but that's way better than what untempered glass would cause - a very few large, heavy, sharp glass pieces falling down on the showerers.

The glass has to go somewhere, folks.

Let's be careful out there.

(Source)

World's First Laser Rust Remover

Well that's pretty stunning.

In doing some research about the laser, here's what I've found out...

From MachineDesign.com...

The company explains that the device aims short, 1000-W laser pulses at the rusted piece, producing micro-plasma bursts, along with thermal pressure and shockwaves to sublimate the rust and separate it from the metal without damaging the piece. Material removal is halted when the laser is applied to a clean surface because it only sublimates rust. (Sublimation is the transition from a solid to a gas.)

Costs for low-power units start at $50,000. Power supplies can be worn as a backpack for mobile devices, and roll-out generators are available for stationary models. 

Japanese Scientists Create Glass That's Pretty Much Unbreakable

Image actually not from the story cited but rather from here

Previous attempts to add alumina to glass have failed, because the raw mixture crystalised as soon as it touched any kind of container. By removing the container and mixing the glass in the air instead, this problem was overcome.

I've posted before about this, but the initial article was a bit more academic and written for a journal.

This one is written for a more populist audience, so it's certainly going to be more useful for my students.

ICE SWORD! (Made With Pykrete)

That's a heck of a sword there,

And it's way stronger than it would have been if it were made of just ice.

See, ice is strong in compression but weak in tension. Paper - toilet paper, for example - is the opposite: weak in compression but strong in tension.

Combine them together, and you get a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. See, that's a composite for you.

The Big Bang Theory - internal combustion engine

That's about where I am with cars.

One of the great things about teaching material science, though, is that I find myself far more willing to admit that ignorance than I am in the chemistry classroom where I pretty much always know more than my students do.

In the material science classroom, I'm far more likely to know less than somebody in the audience does.

The history of the turbo encabulator

I'm not doing any original research here, folks, just duplicating information readily available in Wikipedia's article on the turboencabulator in case that information ever leaves the web.

From the article...

The original technical description of the "turbo-encabulator" was written by British graduate student John Hellins Quick (1923-1991). It was published in 1944 by theBritish Institution of Electrical Engineers Students’ Quarterly Journal [in an article titled "The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry" by "J.H. Quick, Student"^[2] as also noted by consulting firm Arthur D. Little in a 1995 reprint of Quick's description, and giving Quick's full name.^[3]

The earliest written U.S. source may have been in 1946, in an Arthur D. Little Industrial Bulletin. An early popular American reference to the turbo-encabulator appeared in an article by New York lawyer Bernard Salwen in Time on April 15, 1946. Part of Salwen's job was to review technical manuscripts. He was amused by the jargon and passed on the description from the Arthur D. Little pamphlet.^[1]

Time got with the gag, featuring the device in a May 6, 1946 issue, described as "An adjunct to the turbo-encabulator, employed whenever a barescent skor motion is required."^[4] A month later a response to reader mail on the feature appeared in the June 3, 1946 issue:

If the sackful of mail we have received from you is any indication, the story of "The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry" struck many a responsive chord. Aside from those of you who wanted to be reassured that TIME hadn't been taken in, we received the customary complaints about using too much technical jargon for the layman, observations such as "My husband says it sounds like a new motor; I say it sounds like a dictionary that has been struck by lightning"; suggestions that it "might have come out of the mouth of Danny Kaye," and plaintive queries like: "Is this good?" Wrote one bemused U.S. Navyman: "It'sh poshible." To some the turbo-encabulator sounded as though it would be a "wonderful machine for changing baby's diapers." A reader from Hoboken assumed that it would be on sale soon in Manhattan department stores. Many of you wrote in to thank us for illuminating what you have long wanted to tell your scientist friends."^[5]

In 1962 a turboencabulator data sheet was created by engineers at General Electric's Instrument Department, in West Lynn, Massachusetts. It quoted from the previous sources and was inserted into the General Electric Handbook.^[6] The turboencabulator data sheet had the same format as the other pages in the G.E. Handbook. The engineers added "Shure Stat" in "Technical Features", which was peculiar only to the Instrument Department, and included the first known graphic representation of a "manufactured" Turboencabulator using parts made at the Instrument Department.

In c. 1977 Bud Haggart, an actor who appeared in many industrial training films in and around Detroit, performed in the first film realization of the description and operation of the "Turboencabulator", using a truncated script adapted from Quick's article. Bud convinced director Dave Rondot and the film crew to stay after the filming of an actual GMC Trucks project training film to realize the Turboencabulator spot.^[7]

In c. 1988 the former Chrysler Corporation "manufactured" the Turboencabulator in a video spoof.^[8] Rockwell Automation"manufactured" the renamed Retro-Encabulator in another video spoof in c. 1997.^[9] On April Fools' Day 2013, Hank Green released a SciShow episode on YouTube entitled "The Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator."^[10]

Here are scans of the original Quick article...

...and the GE Handbook...