The Crystal That Could Destroy All Medicine

My favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut. His writing simply connects with me - might be his Hoosier background, his secular humanism, or the simplicity of his ideas on the shapes of stories. I've read all of Vonnegut's novels and many of his short stories.

In his novel Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut presents a fictional idea of ice-nine, a super-stable form of solid H2O that is able to 'infect' any sample of water with which it comes into contact. The ice-nine is so stable that it has a melting temperature of 45.8 C leading to all of the liquid water in the fictional world solidifying - which leads eventually to the end of civilization as we know it.

Ice-nine is fictional, but the two forms of ritonavir discussed in this video aren't fictional at all. Ritonavir was an incredibly important drug for HIV patients, and the useful crystalline structure of ritonavir was spontaneously replaced with a less useful polymorph and nearly destroying the drug's total production.

Along the way, the video looks at tin pest and tempered chocolate, other examples of polymorphism.

Have We Been Mining Wrong This Whole Time?

I've heard for a very long time that someday archeologists would have a field day digging into our landfills.

Now it looks like our waste is useful for more than just learning about us. It's useful for recovering trace amounts of rare earth metals. 

This video begins with a look at Phoenix Tailings, a company that is trying to find rare earth metals in tailing ponds from mines around the country. If this works at scale, this could clean up massive post-mining waste dumps all around the world.

It then moves on to explore the possibility of recovering metals from acidic mine water waste like that from Berkley Pit, and the video closes with companies that are exploring how to recover metals from electronic waste (e-waste) with a look at the environmental costs and economics of all these proceses. 

Are Electric Cars Really More Environmentally Friendly?

I'd heard that at one point the average electric car (or hybrid) is worse for the environment to produce than even a Hummer because of the energy that goes into the production of the battery. The moment the two vehicles start driving, the electric vehicle starts catching up with its Hummer competitor.

The video today doesn't necessarily get into that. It looks at the efficiency of electricity produced by power plants and compares that to how efficient a gas-powered car would need to be in order to be more efficient than an average EV in various states of the US.

I did not know that - as of this video being produced in 2018 - Colorado was the dirtiest power-generating state and that Alaska was the cleanest.

Metals in glass are AWESOME!

So many pretty colors of glass!

I have to hunt down some of those metal oxides to add to my glass in matsci class.

Just look at the possibilities...

source - from YouTube video above

Oh, and the video talks about how some metal oxides (erbium and holmium, in particular) change color in different light sources, but that doesn't diminish how pretty they all are.

source - from YouTube video above

I may make a project out of producing that rainbow up there for myself.

Anybody want to pitch in to share in the purchase of the various oxides? I know I won't be able to buy less than like a quarter pound each, and I'll only need like twenty grams 

How The World's Most Expensive Color Is Made

Good lord that's a labor-intensive process.

I understand that the quality of the final product is important and noticeable by really discerning artists and art lovers, but I'm amazed that anybody still uses this method to produce ultramarine blue from lapis lazuli. I'm kind of glad to know that he uses a different - supposedly secret, faster, and higher-yielding than the Cennini method.

I'll warn you that the later half of the video is mostly about the politics and economics of the mining in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It's interesting, but it's not so much about the material production but more about material sourcing.

 

Making Uranium Glass With some Unusual Properties!

I make glass with some regularity in my material science class. We batch glass and add in manganese oxide (purple), chromium oxide (green), copper oxide (light blue), and cobalt oxide (dark blue) to produce colors.

From watching this video, I'm thinking I may need to buy some new crucibles and try other oxides to check out more colors. I'm not as worried about their color under UV light - though that is kind of gorgeous - but rather under various visible light sources.

Source - compound interest

Science Hasn't Answered Why This Works

Clickbait titles aside, Nate From The Internet (formerly of The King of Random youtube channel) has been posting some outstanding videos of late.

This one looks at how temperature and soap both have effects on the brightness of the glowsticks - hence on the rate of the chemical reaction taking place within the glowstick.

My thought is that the soap allows the oil- and water-based chemicals in the glow stick (my source here is that I've cut glowsticks open and put my hands in the liquid, noticing that some of the liquid felt oily) to mix together more effectively which speeds up the reaction.