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.

The $1 Trillion Problem Diamonds Can Solve

Polycrystalline diamonds aren't nearly as pretty as monocrystalline ones are, but they seem to be much easier to produce - especially if you're trying to grow them onto a computer chip.

...which I would never have thought to do but which seems to be really desirable because diamond is a phenomenal conductor of heat, seemingly an improvement on aluminum as a heat sink for electronics on a massive scale.

image from YouTube video above

All that's left is to grow those diamonds via chemical vapor deposition - which is also incredibly cool.

Why Making Blue M&M’s Is So Hard | WSJ

I'll admit to having long-term skepticism about the use of artificial sweeteners, dyes, preservatives, and a lot of other things in our world.

But I also admit that artificial blues are way more vibrant and pretty on M&Ms than the spirulina-based candies.

I know that Aldi's private label goods have eliminated products with artificial dyes, I wonder if they sell any blue candies.