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Transparent Aluminum Is Here
Alien54 writes "Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. (link includes a picture of samples) Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a "flame-spray" technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides (see also: A Rosenflanz et al. 2004 Nature 430 761). Scotty would be pleased."
I am beginning to suspect that the whole idea of sci-fi is in fact a future society time-travelling back every now and then to make a new 'Star Trek' film to nudge society onto a slightly different path
The number of Star-Trek-driven ideas that have become reality is astounding -
Ok, we're missing the big one, warp drive, but apparently we have to have a war that more or less wipes out humanity first, so I'll be happy to give it a miss in my lifetime...
Oh yeah, FOR [insert deity]'s SAKE, STOP THE WHALING!!!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
As glass itself is technically not a solid but a slow-moving liquid would glass not made from silica have the same general properites as "normal" glass?
I generally think of glass as being very inert for example. Anyone know if this would be the case if the glass was composed of differant substances?
(chemistry maybe?)
One of the great things about sci-fi as a thematic backdrop (be it literature or movies/tv) is that it alone of all the genres has the possibility of inspiring a tangible effect upon the real world.
I remember an interview with James Doohan where he said his greatest pride that came from his career was that he inspired other people to pursue careers where they could make a difference to the world. How many engineers became engineers or went into sciences because of Star Trek?
I'm familiar with the Arthur C Clarke suggesting satellites; I doubt a similar cause/effect with Star Trek IV happened here. However, the similarities are cool, and at least with this genre there is the POSSIBILITY of changing the world for the better.
PS Fortunately such transitions from sci-fi fantasy to real world are few and far between. 90%+ of tv SF and pulp SF is dreck, and I myself and not looking forward to a Brave New World...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
You make that joke, but I started thinking about my reef tank as soon as I read this article. When you go over 36" tall you have to use 5/8-3/4 inch low iron (so your fish and corals are not green) glass. If this is really that much stronger, larget tanks could be made cheaper, becuase the glass could be thinner. I wonder what the optical and strength properties really are? Anyone have more information on the testing?
Wonder woman would be all over this... this is the missing ingredient for the ever elusive "invisible plane".
Seriously though, this has crazy applications. Imagine all the things you could make with this stuff:
Windshields that bend instead of crack, providing protection during an accident
Pairs of glasses that won't break
No more broken windows because the kid down the street hits a baseball at your house.
There seem to be virtually limitless applications, assuming the optical properties are similar to that of glass, which the article alludes to.
I was thinking more about transparent airplanes - no need for dangerous windows & people will get a decent view
Just goes to show how many ideas mentioned in StarTrek actually come about. I guess we still have to work on that warp drive, dilithium crystal regeneration and photon torpedoes...and replicators. "Earl Gray. Hot."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I can't remember where i read about it, but it must've been here.. there are actually IP Phones made by one company that are wearable. Their primary market is hospitals. Ah yes, a quick google found me the product link.
Certainly. Sapphire is a crystal form of aluminum oxide and it is quite transparent. For example it doesn't absorb ultraviolet photons close to the visible spectrum which make it a suitable material to have in the windows to my vacuum chamber when I want to shoot UV laser light in to it.
In Soviet Russia, the profit overlords welcome you!
After all sapphires are basically alluminum oxide too....
Are these windows amorphous like glass or crystaline like sapphires? (Assuming amorphous, but not sure).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I read some comprehensive article on "transparent concrete", probably the NY Times Sunday Magazine, but cant locate the reference. There are several related articles on Google. Concrete is seeing a resurgence as a decorative material, i.e. wall and floor coverings. Theres many ways to modify it to have more attractive decorative properties if you willing to sacrifice some structural strength. Concrete is inexpensive and easy to manipulate.
A more accurate term is translucent concrete. One guy embeds perpendicular optical fibers so some external sunlight gets through. There are other techniques too.
These guys (IGEN, now Bioveris) even licensed the name from Paramount.
http://www.biospace.com/news_story.cfm?StoryID=379 5304&full=1
"IGEN's TRICORDER is a self-contained diagnostic detection module ideally suited for hospital POC testing. It is based on IGEN's proprietary ORIGEN(R) technology, which enables high-value clinical testing, including immunodiagnostic and nucleic acid probe-based measurements."
Even weirder, back in the early 1900's, a man named Harold Warp (Now somewhat famous for starting a huge museum called Pioneer Village in the middle of Nebraska) invented a way of heat bending of plastic glass (Called Flex-O-Glass. The more commonly known 'Plexiglass' is a copy by a later competitor once the patent expired.) that retained its optical properties. This process became known as "Warping". At about the same time, mathmaticians were stumbling across the basics of the time-space continuum, and borrowed the term to refer to bending time/space.
:) )
The main street in Minden, Nebraska has now been renamed from "Brown Avenue" to "Harold Warp Memorial Drive" (Which most people refer to now as "Warp Drive"). A friend of mine lives on Warp Drive, which is kinda cool to a geek like me.
So they did the original creator of "Warping" a disservice when they wanted to obtain Plexiglass instead of Flex-O-Glass.
(Yah, I went to high school in Minden...
I remember seeing a demonstration on conductive polymers, and I immediately took notice of the fact that they had a metallic sheen to them. The same properties that lead to conduction also lead to the reflective properties of metal.
If you just want something transparent that is very durable, you can use something like this alumina technology, or even something crazy like panes of diamond glass or something like that (I'm not sure how strong diamond glass would be, but I'm guessing pretty strong).
On the other hand, a true transparent metal would have lots of desirable properties that none of these materials have. Metals are malleable and ductile, conduct heat well, can withstand stress by deforming, and conduct electricity. All of these properties have to do with the metallic bonds between metal atoms, and consequently they are incompatible with being transparent. That isn't to say that you can't make a nonmetallic material that can transfer heat, or which can bend - but it wouldn't be by the same mechamism as how a metal works.
I always loved metallic bonds simply because they are such an elegant demonstration of how a microscopic property such as chemical bonding leads to macroscopic properties like conductivity and malleability.
For those who want to know more, almost any general chemistry textbook will have a short section on metallic bonding which describes how they work and why they lead to these properties.
Oh, a keyboard, how quaint.
...would trigger the computer to run a level 3 diagnostic on the transporter assembly.
...would trigger the computer to initiate the self-destruct mechanism. Kaboom.
We solved this problem with voice recognition software some years ago. The trouble is, we can't tell if the person is addressing the computer, or is simply talking about a computer. For example:
"Computer run a level 3 diagnostic on the transporter assembly"
or
"Damn machines, I did not tell my computer to self destruct."
Hopefully this problem will be fixed before Zefram Cochrane takes off in a few years.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Of course, Scotty then demonstrated remarkable typing ability despite having little exposure to such a backwards device.
Well, it really depends how long the Russian has been speaking English. I know many Russian immigrants to the US, and they invariably confuse the 'v' and 'w' sounds, and what's more, it seems like the ones who speak English better are more likely to get them confused!
It is true that in Russian there is no 'w' sound, but a Russian speaking English does have the tendency to transpose the two sounds. Why this is, I'm not exactly sure, but as I said, there seems to be a correlation with how long they've been speaking English.
Thus silliness like W's instead of V's entered as a common idea of a Russian accent.
It's a common idea because it's correct. You must listen to different Russians than I do, because they confuse 'v' in 'w', in both directions, all the time. My girlfriend, whose accent is so slight as to be barely noticeable, often substitutes 'w' for 'v', and 'v' for 'w' as well. Interestingly, she only confuses the sounds for words that she isn't familiar with. For example, she would never pronounce "very" as "wery," since it is such a common word, but she might pronounce "voluptuous" as "woluptuous" since she doesn't use that word very often. The confusion goes both ways: once she asked me if I would like to go "vale vatching" this weekend. How do you defend against cuteness like that?
I agree that the Russians have no 'w' sound but for some reason they do sometimes pronounce English 'v' as 'w'. I've heard it a thousand times, at least.
No real Russian sounds like Mr. Chekov
According to several Russians, his accent, although fake, is much better than some of the crap that is passed off as "Russian" in modern movies. According to the Russians I know, the Russian speech in The Hunt For Red October was particularly atrocious to the point of not being comprehensible.
You must listen to different Russians than I do, because they confuse 'v' in 'w', in both directions, all the time.
:-) When I was dating my wife, I used to love how she pronounced my name. Since it starts with a 'J', she'd pronounce it with a 'zsa' (you know, draw a vertical line through an X and you've got the glyph). Cutest thing ever. Sadly, her accent is now nonexistent. Seems I taught her English a little too well. :-(
Indeed. My wife has quite a few Russian family members and friends that we often correspond with. I have *never* heard a 'W' misused. OTOH, it may be a different class of Russians we're talking about. My wife is from a Moscow family of scientists (primarily biology). Pretty much all of them speak more than one language fluently, although quite a few have pretty heavy accents when speaking English.
It's possible that the Russians you know are from some other area of Russia, where their accents differ anyway. Not to mention that they're likely to know less about other languages and therefore more likely to confuse proper sounds.
The confusion goes both ways: once she asked me if I would like to go "vale vatching" this weekend. How do you defend against cuteness like that?
Don't you love that?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade