Materials
Science
22 rabbit holes · 10 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why did only six cars race the 2005 US Grand Prix?
- Is glass actually a very slow liquid?
- Why do racing tyres only grip at certain temperatures?
- How does a defect in diamond measure magnetic fields?
- Why does magnet strength matter so much for fusion?
Rabbit holes
- the blackest black, and the art world's pettiest feud
Vantablack is a forest of vertical carbon nanotubes that traps almost all visible light. When Anish Kapoor got exclusive artistic rights to the sprayable version, Stuart Semple responded by selling the 'pinkest pink' paint to everyone except Kapoor.
Elena Marchetti · 5 sources
- the Pantheon's dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome
Almost 1,900 years old. The concrete gets lighter toward the top (they used pumice), and the coffers take out more weight. And there's just a 9 m hole at the top.
Elena Marchetti · 4 sources
- real Damascus steel, and where the 'nanotubes' story came from
Most modern 'Damascus' is pattern-welded: layers of two steels forged together and etched. Original Damascus blades were made from wootz, and the swirly pattern was bands of iron carbide that formed during forging. A 2006 study of a 17th-century sabre reported carbon nanotubes in it, hence all the 'ancient nanotech' headlines.
Elena Marchetti · 7 sources
- space shuttle tiles could be held by their corners seconds after heating
The silica tiles were so good at not conducting heat that you could hold one by the edges while the center glowed. Then the Columbia part of the trail, which was a lot heavier.
moth · 4 sources
- the 2005 US Grand Prix had six cars
Michelin couldn't guarantee its tyres were safe through Indy's banked final turn after a failure in practice. No compromise was agreed, so all 14 Michelin cars peeled into the pits after the formation lap. Ferrari won a race against two Jordans and two Minardis while the crowd booed.
Elena Marchetti · 5 sources
- how they stopped the Tower of Pisa from falling
Maya Rivers · 4 sources
- old church windows aren't thicker at the bottom because glass flows
Jonas Becker · 5 sources
- racing tyres only work inside a temperature window
Jonas Becker · 5 sources
- a flaw in diamond is one of the best magnetic sensors we have
A missing carbon atom next to a nitrogen atom. Shine green light on it and it glows red, and how brightly it glows depends on its spin state, which shifts with the magnetic field. And it works at room temperature, which is rare for anything quantum.
Matteo Rossi · 6 sources
- gallium melts in your hand and wrecks aluminum
Melts at about 30°C, so it turns liquid on your palm. Put a drop on aluminum and it seeps along the grain boundaries until the aluminum crumbles. Also: gallium was one of Mendeleev's predicted elements, 'eka-aluminium'. When its discoverer published a density, Mendeleev wrote to say it was off. It was remeasured and Mendeleev was right.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- Prince Rupert's drops survive a hammer and explode if you snip the tail
Drip molten glass into cold water and you get a tadpole you can hit with a hammer on the head. Bend the thin tail and the whole thing turns to powder. The outer skin is locked in compression and the core in tension, and snapping the tail lets the tension loose all at once.
moth · 5 sources
- why American houses are made of sticks
Cheap timber, cheap nails, and balloon framing in the 1830s let anyone with a hammer build a house. Europeans are always shocked by it.
Elena Marchetti · 4 sources
- aerogel started as a bet about jelly
Kistler supposedly bet a colleague that he could replace the liquid in a jelly with gas without it shrinking. The result, around 1931, was aerogel.
Matteo Rossi · 6 sources
- why fusion people got excited about superconducting tape
Tokamak performance climbs very steeply with magnetic field strength. Tape made from REBCO superconductors allows much stronger magnets that also run warmer, so in theory a tokamak a fraction of ITER's size could do a similar job.
Maya Rivers · 6 sources
- tintypes aren't tin, and they're having a comeback
It's a thin sheet of iron, coated with collodion and silver, exposed while still wet and developed on the spot. Each one is unique and mirror-reversed. They were cheap and didn't shatter, so Civil War soldiers had them made to send home.
Fern Achterberg · 6 sources
- Roman concrete heals its own cracks
Maya Rivers · 5 sources
- the summer of LK-99
I refreshed for replication videos for about a week straight in August 2023. Half-levitating flakes, theory papers appearing in days, everyone suddenly an expert in apatite crystal structures.
Dev Malhotra · 7 sources
- a lab experiment that has produced nine drops since 1927
Pitch looks solid and shatters if you hit it with a hammer, but it's a liquid hundreds of billions of times more viscous than water. A funnel of it at the University of Queensland has dripped nine times since it was set up in 1927.
Dev Malhotra · 5 sources
- graphene was isolated with sticky tape
Geim's lab had 'Friday night experiments', side projects with no grant behind them. One was peeling graphite with tape until a flake was one atom thick. That was 2004; the Nobel came in 2010.
Quinn Harlow · 6 sources
- everyone hated the halo
Introduced in 2018 to a chorus of 'it's ugly'. Since then it's been credited in several big crashes, like Grosjean's car going into the barrier and catching fire in Bahrain in 2020 (he climbed out) and Zhou's car flipping into the catch fence at Silverstone in 2022. Grosjean said himself he'd been against it and wouldn't be here without it.
Jonas Becker · 5 sources
- the 'Woodstock of Physics' was a 1987 superconductor session that ran past 3am
The American Physical Society added a last-minute evening session on the new ceramic superconductors and people packed the hall and overflowed into the corridors. Talks were limited to about five minutes each.
Arash Mohammadi · 6 sources
- did crumbling tin buttons doom Napoleon's army?
Jonas Becker · 5 sources