Nonstick is prob safe - the factories aren't (PFAS contamination)

During my senior year at Wabash College I wrote a column for our student newspaper, The Bachelor. In one of the columns, I put forth my thoughts about the damage we were doing to the environment. I can sum my thoughts up then as 'in the short run, we're clearly destroying our environment...in the long enough run, the planet won't even remember we were here.' 

Amazingly, my thoughts on that haven't much changed in the two and a half decades since I wrote that column, though my thoughts as to how we're poisoning our environment have been informed by a bit more learning about science since then. I'm pretty sure it's the polymers that will be our undoing. We're making remarkably stable molecules that are inherently hostile to all living things at the moment - at least until something evolves to consume them, which will hopefully happen eventually - and we're doing so in remarkable volume.

If there's one thing we need to do to save the life on our planet, it's to stop mucking about with polymers. Stop making them. Stop burning them. Stop refining them.

Weird metal that's also a glass is insanely bouncy

I've been looking for an amorphous metal demonstrator off and on for a few years but with no success.

There are some samples of amorphous metals available on ebay, but I really don't have any idea of what those metals actually are, whether they're really the zirconium-beryllium-titanium-copper-nickel alloy that Steve describes at 7:10 in this above video.

This video sees Steve explore how to optimize the bounces - which material should the ball bearing be made from, how big should the ball bearing be, how can you measure the number of bounces most easily - which is cute, but the big payoff in the video comes after around 10:00 when Steve explains how materials plastically deform and why amorphous metals don't easily deform plastically.

That's absolutely fascinating, and I even more desperately want one of these atomic trampoline demonstrators.

Feel free to hunt one down and buy me one for Christmas. I'll happily give you my address if you do get ahold of one.

Now I'm curious how an amorphous metal would respond to a hardness test. Would it be much tougher to create a traditional 'dent' from a hardness tester?

(In hunting down more info on amorphous metals, I might've found a preliminary answer to that one on the LiquidMetal website, scroll down partway to find hardness data.)

Here's more info about amorphous metals and a video from Grand Illusions, from whom Steve borrowed his atomic trampoline demonstrator.

• MRSEC at UWisconsin - amorphous metal page
• LiquidMetal - the trade name under which the amorphous metal is available
• A white paper about the Atomic Trampoline from UWisconsin & Arthur Ellis
• LiquidMetal's wikipedia article
• "The Case for Bulk Metallic Glass" paper from Science Direct
• A white paper from Taylor Edge electronics about metallic glasses and the atomic trampoline demonstrator
• Information about vitreloy, a different commercial name under which metallic glass has been available

Homochirality: Why Nature Never Makes Mirror Molecules

Chirality is incredibly simple on the surface, but the effects of chirality are incredibly complicated and important in the biological world.

Our world - our universe - favors one handed-ness over the other, and we sometimes get in big trouble when we interact with the wrong version of a molecule.

If you want to know more about just how right- or left-handed molecules rotate light waves, check out more from Steve Mould.

When Pretty Colors Were Deadly - J. V. Maranto

Better living through chemistry, eh?

Lead does make some gorgeous colors, but it's awful for us.

The lore of arsenic green has been long known in chemistry, including in Scheele's Green and Napoleon's death.

It's the Fiestware, though, that always interests me the most. I'm always tempted to buy myself a sample of the old, uranium-colored Fiestaware because I have a bunch of the modern, non-radioactive Fiestaware, and I love it.