Lunch & Learn: The Science Behind Art, with the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Give 'em a break, alright?

It was the pandemic. People were trapped in their houses. They were doing their best to create content that was interesting and that could be enjoyed remotely.

No, a video of two people talking remotely to each other while narrating a slide show isn't necessarily the most exciting of presentations, but I can vouch for Dr Smith being an entertaining guy. He gave me and our summer ASM campers a tour of the Indianapolis Museum of Art's conservation lab about ten years ago, and it is one of the more unexpectedly great tours that I've been on through those summer workshops.

Take some time and see what Dr Smith has to teach us about art conservation and forgery detection today.

Pothole patch - some updates

Source - link

We've been showing videos about the Case Western Reserve students who invented a better pothole patch for years in our summer camps and in our material science courses at Princeton.

I usually add the fact that most of those videos, however, are now a decade old, and I haven't seen the product being used. Thankfully one of my campers last summer took that as a challenge and went hunting for an update. 

Here's what he and I have been able to find...

• Feb 2017 - Cleveland.com - "It has been more than five years since Okoye and three other students created the product, which received entrepreneurship recognition in 2012. Okoye said the idea never died, but attending college and finding a job while refining the product and seeking funding, took time." 
• U-Patch Canada (YouTube) - 20 short, non-narrated test videos of the Thumper Pad in potholes, all from January 2018
• Yeu Patch (Facebook) - No new posts since Feb 2019
• KMBC.com - "KC uses thump pads as temporary fix to potholes" 
• KMBC.com - The same story as above but as video.

There are a bunch of other, similar stories from those time periods, but the websites that the company website that I found - http://yeupatchtechnologies.com/ - doesn't seem to be registered anymore.

Flash photography used to be pretty wild

I remember having flash cubes in cameras when I was growing up, but I had no idea how literally explosive they really were.

There's a lot of build up and explanation, but the money shot really shows up around 20:30 and onward. It's then that they get the right resolution and exposure time to see what's really happening within the flash bulbs when they ignite.

Our phones are miraculous, but their flash isn't nearly as cool as a flash bulb ever was - much less the original limelight.

Periodic Table...unstable bench

Source - Reddit

 The bench looks to be sturdily enough installed to me.

Though the table needs to be updated with the newest elements and the names for elements 110 and 111.

See, it's funny, though, because many - but not all - of the inner transition metals are radioactive meaning that their nuclei are unstable and will decay into more stable nuclei.

It's a joke that requires a little chemical knowledge but that falls apart if you have a lot of chemical knowledge.

Why on Earth is Depleted Uranium Used for Military Ammunition?

Depleted uranium just sounds terrifying. Sure, you can pick up some uranium ore and yellowcake from United Nuclear, but trying to buy depleted uranium is going to likely be a little dodgier.

With that being said, the US military has used depleted uranium (DU) as a source of armor penetrating ammunition over the years. I thought - wrongly from the video above - that the DU was simply used because of its high density and nature otherwise as nuclear waste. Today's video posits that there are quite a few other advantages of DU in high-caliber munitions applications.

There are also some seemingly obvious health risks involved in living in an area where spent DU shells are peppering the ground or having been in a tank where DU rounds entered and as least slightly vaporized. The video also goes through those health risks and says that they have largely been disproven, though I would be skeptical and appreciate that many military branches are "not considering depleted uranium anymore because of the environmental problems associated with it, be [they] real or perceived."

I think I'll stick to good ol' tungsten for my armor piercing needs.