Making Ferrofluid

A great presentation by Scientifiic Tuesdays that covers not only how ferrofluids work, but how to make your own!

Making Diamonds with a Blowtorch

This video creates some interesting discussions about how diamonds are made, natural and synthetic, as well as allotropes of carbon.  Its also fun to talk about the cost involved in this experiment and why its not worth running a blowtorch for 8 hours to make tiny diamonds.

Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future

Much happiness this month when my new issue of Wired showed up with an article titled "Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future". Then I read the full article and got a wonderful description of tempering (tension/compression) and substitution tempering (dipping in a molten potassium salt) to adjust the properties of the glass. Plus it's all about the Gorilla Glass's that's used in the iPhones (and other touch-screen technologies), so it's stuff the kids actually will know about.

Check out the full article at the link above.

Making Stuff Smarter Activity Clip

"The Three Stooges Effect...when the Three Stooges tried to get through a doorway at the same time, and they couldn't?"

"The cornstarch doesn't want to get out of its own way, so when you push on it really hard, it can't move out of the way fast enough. When you hit it really slowly, you can push through it like a liquid."

The 'fill a pool with cornstarch and water' demonstration never gets old.

Making Stuff Stronger: Demonstration Clip

The Making Stuff series is an outstanding exploration of materials engineering and science with four episodes: Smaller, Stronger, Smarter, and Cleaner. In the series David Pogue plays the inquisitive and often comedic and corny host who looks at a number of materials being made at the cutting edge of materials science.

Here he takes a look at Kevlar, providing an excellent graphic showing the polymer's structure, and then suggesting a possible new use for a thick, Kevlar cable.

Scientific Tuesdays: Turn Styrofoam into pseudo-plastic

The demonstration of dissolving Styrofoam into acetone is one that we do in the summer ASM workshops, typically selling the demonstration by counting how many Styrofoam peanuts you can crush into a film canister, having hidden a small amount of acetone in the canister before the beginning of the demonstration.

At the end of the demonstration, however, we always end up with an amount of goopy, dissolved Styrofoam mess. The presenter in this video uses the term pseudo-plastic for what is left at the end when the goopy mess hardens. I'm a little curious as to why the pseudo comes into play, but that may have to do with my lack of understanding of exactly what plastic means.

Anybody want to clarify for me?

Macedonians (Geeks) created cement three centuries before the Romans

"The Greeks are hoping that tourists will flock to see a building that is second only in significant to the Parthenon in Athens." Yeah, but I'm thinking that the Parthenon has a better PR department.

The title certainly suggests more about cement than the video actually delivers - with the only mention of the cement coming in at 0:27 and lasting about ten seconds.