I've seen the reverse spherification technique of using sodium alginate and calcium chloride solutions to produce edible, gelled products (Kool Aid worms, gelled drink spheres, cocktail pods). Sometimes the calcium chloride is swapped out for calcium lactate because it's really the calcium ions that are necessary for the process.
But using that process to make gelled glass which can be shaped in ways that glass normally couldn't be shaped is pretty amazing. All respect to Karen Lise Krabbe for developing this technique. If you want to learn more, you can check out her ebook on the technique.
This video definitely doesn't make me sad, though I would understand why you might end up a bit blue after learning about the manufacturing process of lapis lazuli-based paints.
The Cennini method described here is understandably expensive - because it's insanely labor-intensive.
Understandably, Mohammed has a less labor-intensive method that he developed, but he's not sharing that with us in the video.
From about 6:40 onward, the video shifts from following the production method to looking into the mining of lapis lazuli in Afghanistan, a more political discussion than the initial portion of the video. Then they come back to Mohammed as he explains why natural, lapis-based paints are 'better' than its synthetic replacements.
There has long been question as to whether Napoleon was killed by the arsenic in the green pigment in his wallpaper. Modern analysis of the wallpaper shows that there was arsenic in it but that it likely wasn't enough to kill Napoleon by itself. Lifelong arsenic exposure did probably hasten his death but probably wasn't the final nail in the coffin.
What might kill you though, could be flipping through one of the four remaining copies of the book Shadows from the Walls of Death, two of which can be found in the University of Michigan library's rare book collection.
A hundred copies of the book were produced, showing off arsenic-containing wallpapers and not a whole lot of text - health warnings and a few Old Testament warnings about plague, apparently. Most of the copies were destroyed, but four exist - two at U of M, one at Harvard, and one at the National Library of Medicine. The Michigan copies are apparently stored with the pages inside plastic covers.
The photo with this post isn't of Shadows from the Walls of Death but rather from a non-arsenic-containing reproduction text called Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Nineteenth-century Home (available from Amazon).
Barnaby Dixon is an impressive puppeteer that I first heard about probably ten years ago. If you haven't checked out some of his work, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes there first.
In this instructional video, Barnaby explains how he uses a thermoplastic polymer - a polymer that becomes flexible when it's heated above some temperature but is rigid below that same temperature. It's a great example of the polymer's glass transition phase change. Because polymers are mixtures, they don't necessarily have definite melting temperatures as pure substances like elements or compounds do. Instead they have ranges of temperatures during which they aren't quite solid or liquid but are flexible and moldable - think of hot glass being shapeable but not liquid.
I have some of this at school. It used to be available from Educational Innovations. That's where I bought it, but they sadly don't carry it anymore. Of course, just about anything is available at Amazon if you search for pcl moldeable plastic.
Most hand manufacturing processes are stunning to watch, and in this case it apparently produces a product that is superior to mass manufactured competitors. It has to be way more expensive and time-consuming, though.
The source of this image is a reddit post which included only the following explanation, "The bathroom in our science building has the periodic table in tiles".
I need more info.
Where's the building? I assume it's a university science building, but there's no info provided.
Why do the metalloids seem to continue diagonally down from the table itself?
How old is the bathroom design? Nihonium (element 113) is the last element shown, and that was created in 2003 or 2004 with the discovery not adjudicated until 2015.
Why do the metalloids, halogens, and noble gases get to continue upward into the border design?
(Oh, and I can't take credit for the title joke. That came from the first comment on the reddit post.)
As I mentioned last week, I toured the Indianapolis Art Museum's conservation lab as part of our summer ASM materials camp a decade or so ago. It was a great tour given by Dr Gregory Smith, star of this series of videos through which he explains the process of verifying the age and pedigree of an Uzbek Coat of Many Colors.
The rest of the four-part series is after the jump.
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.
The early part of this video defines pigments versus dyes. I'll admit that I didn't have any idea there was an actual distinction between those two. I am curious, though, as to whether the insoluble and soluble designation depends on the nature of the solvent. Like are some chemicals pigments in oil but dyes in water-based solutions?
I was fortunate enough to get to tour the Indianapolis Art Museum's forensics lab maybe a eight or so years ago as part of the ASM material science summer camp that I got to teach in Indianapolis for science teachers in the area.
The bearded guy, Dr Gregory Smith, gave us our tour that year, and it's one of the better tours that I've gotten from any of the tours I've taken from the camps around the country - especially from among the 'clean' tours.
Dr Smith did a great job telling a story of what they do in the lab as well as how they help the art conservators and museum staff both take care or restore the artwork and also to verify that the artwork is really what is purported to be.
Other than that tour and attending a wedding in the museum's gardens, I've not been to the Indianapolis Art Museum. I do wish I would have gotten up there for the Chemistry in Color exhibit.
I stumbled upon the above video in searching for totally different ceramic stuff on YouTube, but I was immediately taken by the magnetic stalactites that the artist is creating in the video still.
He mentions in the video that he creates them by using a magnetic clay of his own devising between two super-strong magnets.
Then the video goes through him using his ceramic as an electrode - which inherently doesn't make sense to me since ceramics are naturally non-conductive - in what appears to be a copper (II) sulfate solution and using a current to grow copper crystals on the ceramics.
Then the gold, pocked inner surface of other ceramic bowls showed up, and I was blown away with the beauty.
So I went searching the guy out to see just how much one of his pieces would cost me - assuming fully that I wasn't going to be able to afford it.
One of the comments on this reddit post pretty well nails what I think is happening in the above video.
I'm pretty sure that the lines are made out of some kind of wax that is printed on there that blocks the glaze from going past it if it's the right amount becuse of surface tension.
Then I found another comment that linked to this video...
A few years back - when I was helping teach an ASM materials science camp at Southport High School in Indianapolis - I got to tour the Indianapolis Museum of Art's conservation lab. It was a fascinating tour as we got to see their pigment collection, how they scanned paintings and other artworks, and were able to see the science that goes into both conservation and authentication of artworks.
It's really wonderful to be able to see that there are do many non-traditional science jobs out there, particularly when those science jobs overlap with other areas of interest. I would imagine that an art-lover with a science bent would be thrilled to know about this as an option in the career field.
Big thanks to Gregory Smith - you can see him a few videos below this - for providing that spectacular tour for our camp group.
Before a select audience of 250 rapt ladies and a dozen faintly bored gentlemen, some 13 bosomy A.E. Associates in flowing evening gowns gyrated gracefully about a stage in earnest imitation of atomic forces at work. An ample electron in black lace wound her way around two matrons labeled "proton" and "neutron" while an elderly ginger-haired Geiger counter clicked out their radioactive effect on a pretty girl named Agriculture. At a climactic moment, a Mrs. Monica Davial raced across the stage in spirited representation of a rat eating radioactive cheese. Mrs. Davial, it was noted in the program, had "recently returned from a trip to Tibet" and hence presumably had a nice understanding of these things. A small boy named Bunny May was on hand to guide recalcitrant atoms into their proper places.
Holy poop, this description is of "Isotopia: An Exposition on Atomic Structure, Written in the Form of a Mime" by Muriel Howorth (more on her in a bit). It seems that the 'ballet' was only performed once, but thankfully the hand-typed 'script' was donated to the British Library and preserved there. You can check out most of the text (some of the scans seem to have been cut off) on the Atomic Gardening website.
I love that atomic energy was such a fad in the mid 20th century, absolutely love it.
I wonder if I could convince Mr Fielder to have his theater students perform this someday...
I don't have a clue what the vandal wanted to say about art or Rothko by defacing this painting. I've read an interview with him soon after the incident, and I still don't know. It looks like he was given two years in jail for the crime. That's appropriate because that's about the same length of time it took conservators to restore the painting.
The amount of science that goes on behind the scenes at art museums is amazing to me. I was lucky enough to tour the conservationlab at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and it was one of the more impressive 'factory' tours that I've been on, just fabulous stuff going on there.
This video goes through the process that the conservators went through in trying to restore the damaged Rothko. At a very base level, the technique is nothing more than a solubility question. Find something (we can see at 8:39 that the chosen solvent for the black areas was "1 pt (10 mls) EL / 1 pt (10 mls) BA", but I have no ideal what EL and BA are) that dissolves the vandalizing ink but doesn't dissolve the original painting. Apply that solvent carefully, repeat and proceed.
But the art that's involved in that is - to me - as impressive as the original art making.
Restoration can be horribly done when the materials aren't understood, but clearly these conservators are brilliant at their job.
By the by, if you want to learn about the paintings themselves, you could do a lot worse than this video.
I like the idea of a weekly hour of science content on NPR, but I can't stand Ira Flatow. He's obnoxiously curious, interrupts his guests with inane questions, and just generally annoys the crap out of me. I prefer the show when he has a substitute host.
That being said, sometimes the guests have fascinating things to say. On this episode, Ira interviews the senior conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago.
It's fascinating that the painting has faded with exposure to oxygen and light exposure and that Van Gogh knew this - not that he knew the chemistry but that he was aware of the fading of the paints overtime and painted in a way to allow for that.
We're continuing this week with a little more on the art theme. It's a very different kind of art from last week's memory metal flower, but there are still pedals involved. (groan)
Wired magazine has a brilliant article detailing the incredible process of color matching the paint on a repaired part of a car to the paint on the rest of the car. At first blush, the process seems awfully simple - pick up a can of the paint used to paint the car originally. Things are a little more complicated than that, however, as no repair shop is going to stock 50,000-60,000 different paints (the number of car colors on the road according to the article), no car in need of repair looks exactly like it did when it first rolled off the production line. and because the original paint job on most cars involves twenty three different dimensions to the color - sparkles, coarseness, red, blue, green, angle, diffuse coarseness, and so on.
The knowledge and skills involved in color matching are absolutely mind-boggling. There's an art to it all.
I'm not sure as to the utility of the individual element character cards over at Elements - Experiments in Character Design, but I like a lot of the designs. Here are a few of my favorites, and I warn you that after element 95, they become increasingly boring.
Each card contains a single fact about that element - what it's used for, what it's named after, where it was discovered - not useful but at least trivially entertaining.
