Some links …

Exon points us to this Science Roll post with a compilation of science-oriented video archives.

Philip Ball has a post recounting the history (and the key person) behind the development of goggles that filter out UV and IR radiation.

Guru points us to some of the classic papers from the previous centuries that Philosophical Magazine has published [...]

Liquid Metal

Check out this video that compares the elastic properties — in particular, the resilience or the amount of stored elastic energy — of three materials: an amorphous alloy, stainless steel and titanium. The video is from Liquidmetal Technologies, a California based company founded to commercialize the research on amorphous alloys (or metallic glasses) conducted [...]

iMechanica links

The iMechanica site is a treasure. The good folks there post not only their recent papers and preprints, but also stuff that’s of interest to a general audience as well. Let me just link to a bunch of these general purpose things that appeared there recently:

Advice to a young physicist by Walther Bothe.
12 steps to [...]

MIT’s progress in making synthetic spider silk

From this report [via slashdot]:
“If you look closely at the structure of spider silk, it is filled with a lot of very small crystals,” said Gareth McKinley, a professor of mechanical engineering and part of the group that devised the new method of producing the material.

“It’s highly reinforced.”

The secret of spider silk’s combined strength and [...]

Some materials links

Invisible electronics.

To create their thin-film transistors, [Tobin J. ] Marks’ group [at Northwestern] combined films of the inorganic semiconductor indium oxide with a multilayer of self-assembling organic molecules that provides superior insulating properties.

Synthetic Gecko materials that mimics “microscopic hairs on a gecko foot”. It is “made of layers covered with thousands of stalks with splayed [...]

Nano-knives and superplastic nanotubes

First, the nano-knife (via slashdot):

A prototype microtome knife for cutting ~100 nm thick slices of frozen-hydrated biological samples has been constructed using multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT). A piezoelectric-based 3-D manipulator was used inside a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to select and position individual MWCNTs, which were subsequently welded in place using [...]

Mechanics of superheroes

The spider-’silk’ produced by Spiderman about as thick as his arm — it’s more like ’spider-rope’. But, does it really need to be that thick? No, says this SciAm article on the wonderful combination of mechanical properties of real spidersilk.
The different silks have unique physical properties such as strength, toughness and elasticity, but all are [...]

BMQ

A quick note to tell you — particularly those of you in Bangalore — about the Bangalore Materials Quiz (BMQ), an annual event organized by us for the students of Classes XI and XII. As the name suggests, BMQ covers all aspects of materials: their physics, chemistry, production, processing, properties (mechanical, thermal, electrical, magnetic, optical, [...]

Diet Coke fountains

Why do Mentos and Diet Coke produce such a wonderful effect? The short answer is surface tension and nucleation. For a long answer, go read David Biello’s post over at the SciAm Observations.

Online books in materials science?

Note: Originally posted on 24 January 2005.
Towards the end of his Netspeak column in today’s Hindu, J. Murali points to the Internet Text Archive, “an excellent web location that hosts links to several free open source textbook digitizing [or] hosting projects that include Project Gutenberg, Children’s Library, Million Books Project and Open Source Books”. It [...]

Crystallization

Bento, a chemical physicist (or should it be a physical chemist?) has a two part   series on the liquid-to-solid transformation (aka solidification in metallurgy!). The treatment, which uses the concept of an order paramter, is quite common in physics and chemistry literature (actually, statistical mechanics literature). Those working with phase filed models should [...]