One of the comments on this reddit post pretty well nails what I think is happening in the above video.
Then I found another comment that linked to this 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.
I have absolutely no idea what's being said in the above video, but I like that it shows the time-lapse solidification of the cooking oil in the pan. That puts this video in the lead spot above this one which is in English but doesn't show the actual solidifying.
Now to the other admission that I have about today's topic. I can't find any thorough explanation of how the solidification process happens.
I've looked around and found a whole lot of people asking what the science is but with no acceptable answers. Fryaway - a similar product - has a blog post describing ways that oil can be solidified but never quite saying which method their product utilizes.
They do say that their product is a "non-toxic, plant-based powder", and another blog shows an ingredient list for a similar product as being "natural oil", but that isn't much to go on.
If anybody can find more information specifically on the science of how these cooking oil hardeners work, I would be very much appreciative if you'd share.
I don't think it's one of these oil hardeners, but it might be.
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| Source - NPR article |
We didn't used to need nearly as much lithium as we do now, and we're going to need way more lithium going forward because lithium is used to make pretty much every high tech battery - like those in electric vehicles. Those batteries need a whole lot of lithium.
I've posted about the one lithium mine in the United States and how it's running into conflicts with environmentalists over the destruction of habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat.
Today's article from NPR - which also has a 7-minute audio story in case you'd rather just listen to the story - shows some photos from the aforementioned Silver Peak mine in Nevada and explores other possible sources of lithium including seawater and geothermal power plant brine. Sadly they don't go into the reason lithium is so useful: its position at the top of the activity series and its relative low density making it a great way to store energy in small masses.
Back in December the scientific community announced a breakthrough in fusion energy.
Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me even made jokes about it in their "Who's Bill This Time?" and "Predictions" section - the latter of which saw them joke that the next scientific breakthrough would be a drug that makes people care about fusion breakthroughs.
That same week, Saturday Night Live got in on the game with a cut-for-time sketch about one of the scientists who was supposedly involved in the fusion development.
But they got the science a little wrong...
At 4:58 they claim that Edgar is inert...like a hydrogen atom. Hydrogen is far from inert. Helium is inert, though. I'm guessing somebody on the SNL writing staff got a little mixed up in what they remembered from high school science class.
Then at 5:04 they talk about 'splitting him open' to 'unleash the incredible potential that's locked inside'. I assume that's a reference to fusion...but fusion doesn't split things apart. It fuses them together.
And, yes, I did think those things when I watched the video for the first time.
This is how my brain works.
Don't judge me...
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| Rollover joke - The Earth is, on average, located in the habitable zone, but at any given time it has a certain probability of being outside it, which is why life exists on Earth but is mortal. (Source - XKCD) |
See, it's funny because most of the time, the atom - particularly the Bohr model of the atom - is likened to the solar system with electrons following 'orbital' paths around the nucleus the way that planets follow similar paths around the sun.
As a chemistry teacher, I can say that it's much, much harder to come up with a similarly easily understood analogy for how electrons exist in the quantum mechanical model of the atom. There just isn't any sort of macroscopic thing that is anything like the quantum mechanical model of the atom.
And if the planets did move like electrons, that would be somewhat terrifying - especially as electrons can teleport from region to region a la an electron in a box.
Though I do have some evidence that the planets have a measurable spin, so there is that, at least.
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.
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.
