In Space, No One Can Stop You From Welding

Cold welding is frickin' weird.

Richard Feynman wrote (or said in a lecture - I'm not sure which), "when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to 'know' that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin layers of contaminants in between, the atoms 'know' when they are not on the same part."

But two metallic pieces that don't have those thin layers between them - primarily because they've been in space and rubbing against each other - can spontaneously weld together to become a single piece of metal.

It's possible to get that to happen on Earth, but it's not easy because of all the pesky oxygen we have around us all the time.

Metals are way weirder at the quantum level than we think they are, man.

Why It’s So Hard To Recycle Styrofoam and Polystyrene | World Wide Waste

My wife just passed along that there's a facility near my school that has begun to accept post-consumer Styrofoam for recycling. Apparently they just got a densification machine that allows them to accept Styrofoam and compress it to 1/60th of its original volume so that the polystyrene can then be used to make something new - as they say in their facebook post - like 'insulation, park benches, and more'.

That makes me happy because I'm trying to be good with my plastic waste, and it's really hard to find a styrofoam recycling facility.

Today's video shows that densification process, using heat and pressure to turn the expanded polystyrene into what look like nurdles to me. Those nurdles can then be turned into just about anything that polystyrene can be used for - primarily picture frames in today's video.

Please reduce your plastic use.

If you can't do that, please reuse the plastic.

If you absolutely can't do that, please recycle - not wishcycle - it.

Using plastic waste to help solve sand shortages

Source - bbc article

I've mentioned the possible shortage of sand for use in concrete construction around the world before and - admittedly - haven't heard much of an update on that shortage in the past few years.

Today's article describes an attempt to solve the sand shortage - at least partially - as well as to use some of the seemingly endless supply of plastic trash that we continue to produce in our world by replacing some of that sand with ground up plastic pieces.

There isn't much detail, and I would want to know a few things before considering plastic as a sand alternative...

• Is the plastic post- or pre-consumer plastic?
• What polymers can be used for this?
• Does anything leach from the plastic over the life of the concrete?
• As the concrete structure wears, are microplastics released?
• How does the plastic change the hardness, toughness, strength of the concrete material?

In the long run, this might help extend our construction forward a bit, but I'm coming to realize that maybe we just need to use less stuff.

Heineken WOBO Bottle | Object in Focus | V&A

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Glass is a generally a fairly environmentally-friendly material, being made primarily of sand, so the idea of reusing glass bottles to build homes after they were used for their initial, beer-transporting purpose is brilliant.

I wish it would have worked out...and I also kind of wish I had one of the WOBO bottles, but with only 100,000 of them having been made, I'm guessing the sell for a pretty penny.

Least I Could Do: the Comic

Source: https://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20211003

 Yup...good questions there, young Rayne.

A Brief Scientific History of Glass

 

Source - https://glass.com.ng/glass-fact-history-glass/

Smithsonian magazine has a great article tracing both the history of glass and the modern scientific techniques used to reveal that history - everything from traditional archeology to radioisotope tracers to mass spectrometry.

Could be a really useful crossover between a chemistry and a materials science course, or just an introduction to a glass unit.

Afraid of heights? This is not the job for you | SciTech Now

As opposed to last week's less-then-professional-sounding narrator, this week's video host sounds like he belongs on local television reading the news or interviewing a woman who lost her cat.

He does, however, tell an interesting story of people climbing St Louis's Gateway Arch - one of my favorite places in the world, honestly - to figure out what was causing some staining on the underside of the Arch. One concern was the possibility of damage or corrosion on the surface of the arch.

Luckily, the exploration found that the stains are superficial...and they decided not to clean the Arch - as of the time of this video in 2016.