Just a quick note — after a dormant period of over 16 months! — to tell you that I have started blogging at Materialia Indica, an India-centric group blog by and for materials science folks — academics, researchers, post-docs, grad and undergrad students. See the About page for details. [Update (1 June 2009): Materialia Indica now has a new, more spacious and more feature-rich home at Ning, which offers a complete suite of networking and community-building features that we have always wanted (and our blog lacked). In particular, becoming a member and starting a discussion is far easier for all the members of a community in a social network than in a blog. Hence the move to Ning.

If you are interested in materials science/engineering education and research in India, Materialia Indica is the place to be. Come on in and join us. You don't need a special invitation from anyone; just click on the 'sign-up' link, fill in the details, and you are in!]

As of now, my co-bloggers are Guru (M.P. Gururajan, IIT-D) and Phani (G. Phanikumar, IIT-M).

We would like to expand our team. If you are interested — or, if you know someone who might be interested, let us know through the contact form on the Contributors page.

Now, this blog can go back to being silent …9

Science Daily: Physicists have found a formula for a Spiderman suit.

Chemical & Engineering News: Tips for writing a journal article.

Philip Ball: Grainy tunes from sand dunes.

Drek: Advice for Grad Students [Via Brayden King].

Paul Graham: “It doesn’t matter much where a given individual goes to college.“

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 on its website along with some commentary.

This article in the Hindu is about a study on the saddle point configuration for nucleation of a bubble in superheated water. It claims that this study overturns a conventional view; I am yet to figure out how!

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 at Caltech by Prof. William L. Johnson. Do check out the Liquidmetal website; there is a wealth of materials-oriented information (including applications of amorphous alloys) there.

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 a winning research proposal by George A. Hazelrigg of the National Science Foundation.
• Links to “10 Simple Rules” for writing papers and getting published, writing grants, reviewing, …

In addition, there are course notes on offer:

• Mechanical properties of thin films by Bill Nix.
• Nonlinear fracture mechanics by John W. Hutchinson.

Here are some links that should interest materials people:

• Ranking of mechanics-related journals (as of 2004).
• Most cited papers in solid and computational mechanics.

And finally, here are some tips for finding information on iMechanica:

• How to find what you want in iMechanica!

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 flexibility, according to scientists, has to do with the arrangement of the nano-crystalline reinforcement of the silk as it is being produced—in other words, the way these tiny crystals are oriented towards (and adhere to) the stretchy protein.

Emulating this process in a synthetic polymer, the MIT team focused on reinforcing solutions of commercial rubbery substance known as polyurethane elastomer with nano-sized clay platelets instead of simply heating the mixing the molten plastics with reinforcing agents.

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 tips made of a polyimide, a synthetic like Nylon.”

Metamaterials with negative refractive index:

[Gunnar] Dolling’s metamaterial is made by depositing a layer of silver on a glass sheet, covering this with a thin layer of nonconducting magnesium fluoride, followed by another silver layer, forming a sandwich 100 nm thick. Dolling then etched an array of square holes through the sandwich to create a grid, similar to a wire mesh.

A key advance in Flexible electronics:

The trick to being able to manufacture—rather than handcraft—large arrays of single-crystal transistors was to devise a method for printing patterns of transistors on surfaces such as silicon wafers and flexible plastic. The first step is to put electrodes on these surfaces wherever a transistor is desired. Then the researchers make a stamp with the desired pattern out of a polymer called polydimethylsiloxane. After coating the stamp with a crystal growth agent called octadecyltriethoxysilane (OTS) and pressing it onto the surface, the researchers can then introduce a vapor of the organic crystal material onto the OTS-patterned surfaces. The vapor will condense and grow semiconducting organic single crystals only where the agent lies. With the crystals bridging the electrodes, transistors are formed.

Finally, is open peer review experiment at Nature a failure?

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 electron beam-induced deposition (EBID).

The device employs a pair of tungsten needles with provision to adjust the distance between the needle tips, accommodating various lengths of MWCNTs. We have performed experiments to test the breaking strength of the MWCNT in the completed device using an atomic force microscope (AFM) tip. An increasing force was applied at the midpoint of the nanotube till the point of failure, which was observed in-situ in the SEM.

Next, the superplastic nanotubes of carbon:

The theoretical maximum tensile strain — that is, elongation — of a single-walled carbon nanotube is almost 20%, but in practice only 6% is achieved. Here we show that, at high temperatures, individual single-walled carbon nanotubes can undergo superplastic deformation, becoming nearly 280% longer and 15 times narrower before breaking. This superplastic deformation is the result of the nucleation and motion of kinks in the structure, and could prove useful in helping to strengthen and toughen ceramics and other nanocomposites at high temperatures.

Are you in the mood for something truly inspiring, exciting and, um, spiritual? If not, why, you really ought to be! If yes, watch this short video of a speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Awesome!