The real nano-emoticon

Yesterday, Arunn posted a schematic diagram that used emoticons to explain something in the paper.

But a real nano-emoticon was made and imaged way back in 20006 2006 by Paul W. K. Rothemund; here's the the paper [pdf]. It was featured on the cover of Nature:

As gimmicks go, it was way more cool than the corporate logo produced in 1990 by lining up individual atoms ("Artists have almost always needed the support of patrons (scientists too!)."). Twenty-two years later, researchers from the same firm produced this gem: A Boy and His Atom:

Prince Rupert's Drop

A cool demo of the very interesting form of fragility of the toad-shaped glass object called Prince Rupert's Drop [hat tip: Biswajit Banerjee at iMechanica]. And also an excellent use of high-speed photography in popular science.

Tin Pest, etc.

Let's start with a video of tin pest:

From the Wikipedia entry on tin pest:

At 13.2 degrees Celsius (about 56 degrees Fahrenheit) and below, pure tin transforms from the silvery, ductile metallic allotrope of β-form white tin to brittle, nonmetallic, α-form grey tin with a diamond structure. The transformation is slow to initiate due to a high activation energy but the presence of germanium (or crystal structures of similar form and size) or very low temperatures ~-30 degrees Celsius aids the initiation. There is also a large volume increase of about 27% associated with the phase change. Eventually the α-form decomposes into powder, hence the name tin pest.

Tin pest plays a central role in the urban legend that Napoleon's disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia was a disaster because his soldiers' buttons, which were made of tin, turned to grey powder under the harsh, cold temperatures of Russian winter. Yale's Ainissa Ramirez calls it "the world's greatest wardrobe malfunction" in this video. [Update: See also Joe Knight's article in Slate: Napoleon Wasn’t Defeated by the Russians. According to Knight, the real reason is an infectious disease spread by lice.]

The utter calamity of the French invasion of Russia, and the subsequent retreat, is captured so well in Charles Joseph Minard's graphic map, that Edward Tufte calls "the best statistical graphic ever drawn". [see this map for a broader perspective that presents Minard's map with present-day national borders.]

For the Russians, Napoleon's retreat has been a source of intense national pride -- celebrated in major works of art including the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky:

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What's the point of all this? Nothing, really; we just happened to be discussing all this in a recent class on the lead-tin phase diagram in my course on materials thermodynamics. Also, I've always wanted to link to Minard's map, the 1812 overture, and the lead-tin phase diagram ;-)

Inner Life of Stuff

The Up-Goer Five tool challenges you:

Can you explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words? It's not very easy. Type in the box to try it out.

More about the tool here from its creator, Theo Sanderson. I saw it in action first at Suvrat Kher's post describing his research. Here's my attempt, a possible abstract for an upcoming talk on "computational modeling of microstructures and their evolution."

Inner Life of Stuff

We study pieces of matter. Each such piece, called stuff, could be water-like or rock-like, and we are especially interested in what goes on inside rock-like stuff. From the outside, such stuff may look as if it is the same at every place inside, but it is not! It turns out that, much as a house is made up of rooms, stuff is made up of lots and lots of small things, called parts. But, while rooms in a house can't grow bigger or smaller, parts inside stuff can! Some parts may grow bigger while others grow smaller. All this happens, quite easily even, when stuff gets hot.

So, here is the Big Idea: though stuff has no life to speak of, it enjoys some seriously beautiful inner life!

Why is this inner life of stuff important? Because it decides how well stuff works -- some kinds of packing are better than the others. So we need to understand how the parts come to be packed the way they are, and to figure out other ways of packing that make stuff work better. With this understanding, we can do some pretty cool things. We can take soft stuff and make it hard (or go the other way). Or, we can decide what, and how much, can move through it. Many things we use in our lives today -- lights, cars, flying air buses, computers -- are possible because we know how to control and change the inner life of stuff.

So, how do we get to understand the inner life of stuff? By building ideas about how parts change their form. Actually, we take a slightly different line: instead of focusing on parts, we focus on the walls between the parts. When a wall moves, the part on one side grows bigger, while that on the other side grows smaller. By watching walls move, we figure out how parts change their form.

While this is all easy to say, it is actually very, very hard to pull off. Instead of trying to crack the problem by writing on paper (and feeling let down!), we build make-believe stuff inside a computer. Just like real stuff has real parts and walls, the make-believe stuff has its own parts and walls. We then ask the computer to let its not-so-real walls move around just like real walls do. By watching changes in the make-believe stuff brought about by its moving walls, we get a good idea about changes in real stuff.

This talk is about how we study the inner life of stuff, and about what we get out of our studies. We start with walls, and why and how they move. We then show how we build make-believe stuff in a computer to watch moving walls and form-changing parts. We then talk about two very different kinds of stuff to show how our ideas work. Near the end of the talk, we have some things to say about looking at and studying stuff using computers, and about how it is not very different from studying stuff using things (such as focusing glasses) other than computers or paper.

From the Annals of Innovation -- Bag Tags

Yes, the airline baggage tags. In recounting all the wonderful innovations that have led up to the state of the art in tags, the article has some fascinating stuff about the materials that go into these tags:

Let’s look first at how an ABT is made. In the interconnected, automated, all-weather world of modern aviation, tags must be resistant to cold, heat, sunlight, ice, oil, and especially moisture. Tags also can’t tear—and crucially, if they’re nicked, they must not tear further—as the bag lurches through mechanized airport baggage systems. And the tag must be flexible, inexpensive, and disposable. Plain old paper can’t begin to meet all these requirements. The winning combination is what IATA’s spokesperson described as a “complex composite” of silicon and plastic; the only paper in it is in the adhesive backing.

Bag tags must meet another set of contradictory requirements. They must be easy to attach, but impossible to detach—until, that is, the bag arrives safely at its destination and the traveler wants to detach it. Old tags were fastened with a string through a hole, but mechanized baggage systems eat these for breakfast. The current loop tag, a standardized strip of pressure-sensitive adhesive, looped through a handle and pressed to form an adhesive-to-adhesive bond, debuted with the ABT in the early ’90s. And the ABT, unlike string tags and earlier loop-y tag ideas, is easily attached to items that lack handles—boxes, say. Simply remove the entire adhesive backing and the loop tag becomes a very sticky sticker.

Of course while tags must remain rigorously attached, they must also be easy for passengers to remove. Intermec’s spokesperson raves about the adhesive’s “excellent flow properties”—in layman’s terms, simply grab the loop from the inside, with two hands, and gently pull apart to remove the tag. A couple of other clever innovations: Like the tags themselves, the adhesive must be all-weather. Early adhesives couldn’t cope with extreme cold, so snowy tarmacs would end up littered with detached tags (and lost bags). Also, passengers don’t want sticky residue left on their bag’s handles—so the adhesive’s backing is designed to stay in place on the inside of the loop.

Improbable Careers of Materials Engineers

A fascinating bit (caught by Guru) from the obituary of Verghese Kurien, Milkman of India [thanks to Guru for this good catch]:

“What do you know about pasteurisation,” an interviewer asked the young man who had applied for a Government of India fellowship for a Masters in Engineering abroad. “Something to do with milk?” was the uncertain reply. The year was 1946. In his biography From Anand: The story of Verghese Kurien , M.V. Kamath recounts the story of how the youngster was selected to do a Masters in dairy engineering by a government committee that was impervious to his pleas that he be allowed to specialise in metallurgy instead.

As it turned out, Michigan State University did not have dairy engineering, and Verghese Kurien was able to do metallurgy and Physics. But when he came back to India in 1948, it was to a small and unknown village in Gujarat called Anand that he was sent, to work out his two-year bond at the Government creamery on a salary of Rs.600 per month. Hating his job, he waited impatiently for his fetters to loosen. That did not happen. What it did was that V. Kurien, by the conjunction of politics, nationalism and professional challenge, decided to stay on. He would transform rural India.

Verghese Kurien, who became a legend in his lifetime for building a cooperative movement that transformed the lives of poor farmers while making India self-reliant in milk production, died on Sunday in Nadiad at the age of 90. ... [Bold emphasis added]

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Update: I forgot to add a couple of other names to the list of materials engineers who are better known for their exploits / achievements in other fields: Manohar Parrikar (politics) and Sidin Vadukut (journalism).

From the Annals of Academic Pranks: "Disacknowledgements"

This one ended badly for the prankster. A "Disacknowledgements" section in your thesis / dissertation is apparently not protected by the First Amendment [via Scott Lemieux].

[That this case involves my academic discipline -- Materials -- makes it doubly delicious!]

In the spring of 1999, Plaintiff brought his thesis, "The Morphology of Calcium Carbonate: Factors Affecting Crystal Shape," to his committee for final approval. Plaintiff did not include an acknowledgments section of any kind in the document that he delivered to his committee. All three committee members signed an approval page stating, "This Thesis of Christopher Brown is approved." (Emphasis added.) In accordance with UCSB rules, that approval page became the second page of the thesis.

After he had obtained the signature page from his committee, Plaintiff inserted an additional, two-page section into his thesis without the knowledge or consent of his committee members. That section, entitled "Disacknowledgements," began: "I would like to offer special Fuck You's to the following degenerates for of being an ever-present hindrance during my graduate career...." It then identified the Dean and staff of the UCSB graduate school, the managers of Davidson Library, former California Governor Wilson, the Regents of the University of California, and "Science" as having been particularly obstructive to Plaintiff's progress toward his graduate degree. Plaintiff later explained that he had not revealed the section to the members of his committee because he feared that they would not approve it.

Links

1. A pseudonymous author on Withdrawing from a Job You've Accepted.

2. A great collection of Dilbert cartoons on PowerPoint Presentations [Hat tip to Sachin Shanbhag].

3. How would a violin sound if its strings were made of spider silk? BBC News has the story and an audio clip.

4. Video: MIT Students Fight Nerdy Reputation with Charm School.

5. An awesome catch by Scicurious: Friday Weird Science: Got PMS? Time to Spot the Snake!

Awesome News of the Day

Prof. Dan Shechtman has won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The news is all the more awesome because Prof. Shechtman is a fellow member of the tribe in the land of Materials Science and Engineering -- see his official web page at Technion.

Prof. Shechtman's Prize is for his pioneering work on quasicrystals (in aluminum-manganese alloys) which showed a five-fold rotation symmetry -- the kind of symmetry that was (then) forbidden in 'normal' crystals. I can go on and on, but there's nothing better than a video in which Prof. Shechtman himself explains his work:

YouTube Link

One of the interesting bits in the story is the strong, intense opposition to the idea of quasicrystals from Linus Pauling -- a Chemistry Nobel Laureate, and a mega-giant in chemistry. Prof. Shechtman needed to overcome the skepticism (and sometimes, open hostility) of many, many scientific colleagues who just couldn't believe his results and their radical implications. In one of his talks here at IISc, I remember him talking about scientists who said, basically, "Here's what Pauling says, and here's what Shechtman says. Now, who would you believe?" And many of those who said this were chemists who were sure that Pauling could never go wrong.

I think it is absolutely wonderful that it is the Chemistry Prize that has gone to Prof. Shechtman.

Congratulations to Prof. Shechtman!

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Update: Way back in 2005, I wrote a post about three mini-revolutions that shook materials science / condensed matter physics / solid state chemistry in the 1980s. The discovery of quasicrystals was one of them, with the other two being high Tc superconductivity and C-60 (Buckminsterfullerenes, fullerenes or buckyballs). While C60 won the 1997 Chemistry Prize, the work that laid the foundation for the discovery of high Tc superconductivity won the 1987 Physics Prize.

The discovery of quasicrystals had to wait a while for the Prize, but the timing is exquisite -- it won it in the International Year of Chemistry!

Update 2: The Information for the Public issued by the Nobel Foundation does a good job of summarizing some of the history behind the discovery of quasicrystals, and ends with "an important lesson for scientists." Some excerpts:

When Shechtman told scientists about his discovery, he was faced with complete opposition, and some colleagues even resorted to ridicule. Many claimed that what he had observed was in fact a twin crystal. The head of the laboratory gave him a textbook of crystallography and suggested he should read it. Shechtman, of course, already knew what it said but trusted his experiments more than the textbook. All the commotion finally led his boss to ask him to leave the research group, as Schechtman himself recalled later. The situation had become too embarrassing. [...]

[Immediately after Shechtman published his work] the discovery now reached a wider audience, and Daniel Shechtman became the target of even more criticism. At the same time, however, crystallographers around the world had a moment of déjà vu. Many of them had obtained similar diffraction patterns during analyses of other materials, but had interpreted those patterns as evidence of twin crystals. Now they started digging around in their drawers for old laboratory notes, and pretty soon other crystals began to appear with seemingly impossible patterns, such as eight- and twelvefold symmetries. [...]

An important lesson for science

Daniel Shechtman’s story is by no means unique. Over and over again in the history of science, researchers have been forced to do battle with established “truths”, which in hindsight have proven to be no more than mere assumptions. One of the fiercest critics of Daniel Shechtman and his quasicrystals was Linus Pauling, himself a Nobel Laureate on two occasions. This clearly shows that even our greatest scientists are not immune to getting stuck in convention. Keeping an open mind and daring to question established knowledge may in fact be a scientist’s most important character traits.

A Century of Superconductivity

IEEE Spectrum carries a a nice historical overview of superconductivity by Pradeep Haldar and Pier Abetti who focus on this rather baffling fact:

In the 100 years since superconductivity was discovered, only one widespread application has emerged.

A couple of excerpts:

Since [the discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911], physicists have sought to understand the quantum-mechanical origins of superconductivity, and engineers have tried to make use of it. While scientific efforts in this area have been rewarded by no fewer than seven Nobel prizes, all commercial applications of superconductivity have pretty much fizzled except one, which came out of the blue: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

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Müller and Bednorz's work triggered a flurry of research around the world. And within a year scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and the University of Houston found a similar ceramic compound that showed superconductivity at temperatures they could attain using liquid nitrogen. Before, all superconductors had required liquid helium—an expensive, hard-to-produce substance—for cooling. Liquid nitrogen, however, can be made from air without that much effort. So the new high-temperature superconductors, in principle, threw the door wide open for all sorts of practical uses, or at least they appeared to.

The discovery of high-temperature superconductors sparked tremendous publicity—which in retrospect is easy to see was hype. Newsweek called it a dream come true. The cover of Time magazine showed a futuristic automobile controlled by superconducting circuits. BusinessWeek declared, "Superconductors! More important than the light bulb and the transistor" on its cover. [...]

Crisis in Rare Earth Elements

For scarce elements it may also mean to better manage their consumption. Crucial is to reuse and recycle where possible. The use of rare earths in electronic gadgets has risen so much that their concentration in computers is actually higher than that in mines. It pays to recycle. [Emphasis added]

From the editorial in Nature Materials [you'll probably need a subscription to read the article, though].

Catchy Blog Post Title of the Day

When Cleavage is a Bad Thing.

Written by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky over at Cocktail Party Physics, that post discusses a recent Nature Materials report by Demetriou, et alon a tough metallic glass made from an alloy of palladium.

In everyday English, 'strong' and 'tough' may appear to mean the same thing, but in materials engineering, they mean two distinct properties : a material is strong if it resists deformation (denting, bending, or shape change) being hit, poked or pounded; it is tough if it resists fracture (breaking or shattering). Here's Leslie-Pelecky on this difference:

Cleavage [a particularly easy form of fracture] is a good thing for materials you want to break; however, this is not a desireable property if you are trying to build airplanes or buildings. You need a material that is strong which means that it resists changing shape when it is pushed or pulled. You want to be able to put a heavy load on your material without the material denting or bending. You're also looking for toughness, which is a resistance to shattering. If a material is going to give, you'd like it to bend or dent, not shatter.

The study by Demetriou, et al has been making waves -- see here and here -- not only because their palladium-based glass sets a new record for toughness for metallic glasses, but also because it is the first metallic glass that has proven to be "tougher than steel".

QoTD: Otto Neurath on How Knowledge Works

We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismount it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.
-- Otto Neurath (Wikipedia has a slightly longer version)

Found that quote in this article that starts off with an implausible story about the Titanic, and keeps you hooked all the way to the end.

I also found this Joseph Conrad quote that appeals to the materials engineer in me:

But all this has its moral. ... Yes, material may fail, and men, too, may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from-which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made.
-- Joseph Conrad, Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic (1912).