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5 Strangest Materials
MattSparkes writes to tell us that NewScientist recently posted a quick look at five interesting materials with some very strange properties. There are liquids you can walk on, liquids that will escape containers by creeping up the sides, and magnetic liquids that can easily show you the shape of magnetic fields. The story also offers video links to display some of more amazing properties described.
I would like to nominate whatever the hell Wonder Bread is made from.
One tiny loaf can turn an entire nation into disgusting bloated sacks of lazy crap.
Truly a mystery of the ages.
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
I always wondered why I kept sliding out of the bath.
Now I know its just because my atoms all have the same quantum state.
liqbase
When I read about the fluid that can flow up the sides of a container, all I could think about was THE BLOB!
FairTax baby!
According to TFA, "To make a superfluid you must cool helium down to a couple of a degrees below zero - not one to try at home."
Now I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure a couple of degrees below absolute zero isn't possible, and on any other scale I can think of, it's a bit warm for superfluids. I guess he meant "above zero", although a unit would still have been useful. Funnily enough, I was just bitching about scientific faux pas in the mainstream media, but New Scientist?
Oh no... it's the future.
And you can make a solution of water and sodium chloride at -9c, does that mean water doesn't freeze at 0c?
The simple liquid capable of making clothes come off, cars swerve, and random impregnation?
Video for Online Dating Profiles
What no flubber?
"Fall heavy towards the moon, and the moon falls also towards you." -- Nietzsche
Hammer and feather are dropped simultaneously from equal heights (as measured by distance from the center of the moon), separated laterally by a distance substantially less than the moon's diameter. Both hammer and feather experience force from the moon's gravity proportional to their mass, and hence both accelerate at the same rate. Meanwhile, the moon is also accelerating towards the other two objects, but unevenly so: the hammer exerts a greater gravitational pull due to its greater mass. The moon is therefore subject to a torque, causing it to accelerate more rapidly towards the hammer.
The hammer is first to hit the ground.
Anyone who denies this truth is a spatially absolutist lunocentric whose refusal to recognize the validity of hammer/feather mechanics places him wholly beyond the help of Galilean metaphysics. Such hammer/feather rejectionists ought to be banished to the stars, for their own good and for the good of not only hammers and feathers but all subjugated smaller objects, everywhere, who find themselves victims of this scientifically perpetrated emassculation.
--
a756f345ec354225c08ff1a10a43162a
You insensitive clods.
It was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the demo of the people running over the water like that...
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Really? Jesus!
<sorry - had to do it.>
Funny you should say that as I read this today:
"...Yesterday, government scientists suggested that men should take a look at their beer consumption, considering the results of a recent analysis that revealed the presence of female hormones in beer. The theory is that drinking beer makes men turn into women. To test the finding, 100 men were fed 6 pints of beer each. It was then observed that 100% of the men gained weight, talked excessively without making sense, became overly emotional, couldn't drive, failed to think rationally, argued over nothing, and refused to apologize when wrong. No further testing is planned..."
Unfortunately, it does not include the mysterious liquid that prevents servers from being slashdotted.
Coral cache link
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Forget going online. Chances are you can pick it up at your local grocery store. It's been a mainstay at Halloween parties for years: Punch bowl + block of dry ice = foggy punch.
and go looking for 'that boy'?
I notice they didn't mention the goop left on my keyboard after I'm gone from home for long weekend. My roommate doesn't seem to know what it is either...
Pull it, make it longer, it gets bigger... Hmm. I think there would be a big market in the sex toy industry for "devices" made from Auxetic materials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxetic).
Aerogel is a low-density solid-state material derived from gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. The result is an extremely low density solid with several remarkable properties, most notably its effectiveness as an insulator. It is nicknamed frozen smoke, solid smoke or blue smoke due to its semi-transparent nature and the way light scatters in the material; however, it feels like extruded polystyrene to the touch.
At the end of this video there is a short part about the fluid going upwards. http://web.ujf-grenoble.fr/PHY/FOREXPER/TPhelium/p ages/Presentation%20film.html
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I can't tell if your post is hyperbole or not.
...HOWEVER...
So straight up - does the hammer really hit the ground first? Replacing the hammer and feather with larger bodies - say, one (as the hammer's stand-in) which is the same mass as the moon, and the other (the feather's double) which is 1/10th the mass of the moon, it seems obvious that the more massive body will impact first, as it does have a significantly larger bearing on the moon.
Does the hammer's insignificant size relative to the moon negate any realistic gravitational influence it may have? Or for that matter, does the term 'significantly larger' really apply to the hammer and feather?
I think the 3-body dynamics may be so small at that scale as to be nearly nullified - I would suspect that the gravitational pull of the hammer on the moon would move it less than the diameter of an atom required to change the timing of the impact of the two objects. [Unless one is counting the impact of the electron shells prior to the impact of the nucleus, in which case I suspect the preponderance of heavier (atomic weight-wise) elements in the hammer, with correspondingly more electrons, necessitating population of the "larger" d- or f-shells, would be first. But again, it's not the gravitational influence of the mass of the hammer that would be the deciding factor...]
So.... anybody care to do the math?
They left out elastic fluids, such as a mixture of high molecular weight polyethylene oxide in water. Once the fluid begins to pour out of its container, it will partially empty the container, even if righted. This is the open siphon effect. If while pouring out the fluid, you cut it with scissors, the fluid will snap back into the beaker like a rubber band. This can all be done at room temperature.
What makes this happen is the high molecular weight polyer. The molecules become entangled, and when poured, they pull each other along, resulting in the emptying of the container.
These fluids also exhibit other interesting behaviours, such as the Weissenberg effect, where when rotating rod is placed in the fluid, the fluid climbs up the rod. Also, add some particles (or bubbles), start stirring, then suddently remove the stirring rod, you will see the fluid snap back when it comes to rest.
Alas, Taco Bell was left off the list again, coming in at number six.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I can't tell if your post is hyperbole or not.
The hammer would hit first assuming that the relevent section of the moon was perfectly spherical, but the effect is so miniscule that I doubt you could detect it with existing measuring devices. The effect would be largest when the hammer and feather are dropped from opposite sides of the moon (the hammer would pull the moon away from the feather, if they were close by they would both pull the moon towards the other but unevenly so). Certainly there's no way Gallileo would have been able to see a difference. Had he, you know, been on the moon dropping feathers and hammers.
The enemies of Democracy are
Funny note: as i was looking for the thermodynamic properties of plutonium, ebay promised to make me a great offer on it. Seriously, like ice it will expand and get less dense as it drops in temperature. Only, instead of just the one phase change, there are many. Unfortunately, this is the best I can find for a phase diagram. In thermo, my prof put up a much nicer one, just trust, the phase diagram is pretty crazy looking.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
When I was a kid I had a book called "Scientific Experiments You Can Eat." I seem to remember there being something like the "Oobleck" in there.
I'd love to try it out, but I get the feeling my wife would kill me if I started cooking up stuff like that in the kitchen...
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
How about a material that has a negative index of refraction?
s html
It only works for energy with a wavelength of a few meters right now, but weird shit none the less.
http://www.las.iastate.edu/newnews/soukoulis0324.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
... you have to mix the non-newtonian fluid pretty accurately - too thin and it won't support you, too thick and it's trivial... you'll notice they have a stirrer of some sort in the pool video - this is important - this stuff can settle in short time so you end up with mostly water above and mostly cornstarch below. Jearl Walker once lept over tables into a feed trough full of this stufff on his show. He didn't splash a drop. He did, however lose his balance, and tipped the whole thing which slowly flowed into the audience...
And they mention conrflour - I'd stick with cornstarch. One time going France and Hungary to teach science, I figured I'd forego the big containers of white powder on the international flights... and getting to Nice, I found that you can only buy boxes of cornflour, not boxes of cornstarch in French grocery stores. You could get sugar-packet sized envelopes of it, which were labeled in French with something I could not read but I imagine said "You are in France. We are famous of our sauces. If you need cornstarch to make a sauce, then go away!."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
That's ok, David Scott did it for him:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/a15.clsout3.html
So what you're saying is while there's a theoretical difference between the impact timings, the practical effect likely couldn't be measured. Makes sense.
I've seen this comment somewhere before. Although this comment is interesting, it is off-topic and redundant.
This sig cannot be proven true.
It would seem to me like he was making a sharp jab of SATIRE and WIT at people who post AC.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Thinkgeek sells putty called Smart Mass which solidifies when you apply force.
Meh.
Water, as any liquid, only freezes at 0c at 1 atmosphere of pressure and no dissolved contaminants. For every ion in a dissolved compound (for example, sodium chloride consists of Na+ and Cl- when dissolved. This makes it have what is called a "van't Hoff factor" of 2.), the freezing point of the solvent drops. The actual depression is a function of the solvent's heat of fusion and freezing point under 1atm of pressure, as well as the concentration of the solute and its van't Hoff factor. This is why we salt roads in the winter.
Also, substances may freeze at substantially lower temperatures than normal if there is nearly perfect purity, due to a phenomenon known as nucleation. The substance's molecules need some form of particle to act as a "seed" to start forming crystals on.
I decided to stop stealing cynical quotes to use as a signature line.
united nuclear also makes aerogel. that's an interesting material and it's a solid
http://www.unitednuclear.com/aerogel.htm
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Your first two points have to do with surface tension. TFA is talking about non-newtonian fluids which act like solids when a force is applied. See the video of the guy walking across the lake o' corn starch.
I got nothin'
Hey! Who moved the submit button? And what are all these ponies doing here?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I can't tell if your post is hyperbole or not.
This is Slashdot. He was probably being completely serious.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
funny you mention that, i googled the GP's sig, out of curiosity, and the only two hits were the threads in your links...
Dry ice is not a fluid.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yeah, but water is one of the few (only?) materials whose liquid is denser than its solid and, as a result, freezes from the top down, rather than the bottom up. That's pretty strange, in my book.
It also has one of the highest specific heats of any material. (Highest of any common material.)
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
What about LCDs of metamaterial crystals? Any way to use their refraction for multidimensional, or just higher efficiency, light modulation? What about a liquid metamaterial suspending optically normal crystals?
--
make install -not war
We're doing plenty of casual studies on it at my college.
This sig is false.
Even common, everyday stuff can have interesting properties. You can suspend liquid oxygen in a strong magnetic field, for instance, because it's a paramagnetic element. Of course, one could argue that _liquid_ oxygen isn't really an everyday material.
eating corn bread out of your kitchen.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
They don't make it, they sell it. The guy that runs United Nuclear works at Los Alamos, and has for years, and has contacts that get him some scraps that he can sell.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
>Dry ice is not a fluid.
It's also a weirdly specific.
Am I the only person who thinks something like "cryogens" would be a more natural addition to a list whose other members are dilatants, auxetic materials, superfluids, and ferrofluids?
Sure, dry ice may be the cheapest and most readily available household cryogen, and that it sublimates is kind of cool, but every "neat" thing mentioned could be done with any cryogenic liquid. (Well, except the mosquito thing, which doesn't really have much to do with the properties of the dry ice at all.) What's more, there are plenty of neat things that you can do with colder materials that you can't do with dry ice.
Maybe he is the only hammer, feather, moon gravitational expert who reads slashdot. You know they (the HFMG members) have very busy social lives.
BTW, if a hammer and a feather fall on the moon and nobody sees it, does anyone give a shit?
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
a couple years ago that video of the vibrating oobleck inspired me to duplicate it, but i didn't have a handy-dandy oscillating table. so i went out to the thrift store and bought a couple woofers for like $5, laid 'em on the floor facing up, put some saran-wrap on them, and poured in the oobleck. then hooked a moderately powerful amp up to a simple tone-generating app in the computer, and that was it! got some pretty decent creeping growing fingers.
They don't make it, they sell it. The guy that runs United Nuclear works at Los Alamos, and has for years, and has contacts that get him some scraps that he can sell.
Bob Lazar used to work at Area 51. I'm sure he has contacts who can make practically anything. It's a safe bet that only the "tame" stuff shows up in the United Nuclear catalog...
Sure water is pretty unique amongst chemicals, but the article is about "stuff that behaves a little bit outside the norm". Water, being among the most common materials on Earth, does not fit that description. It may be interesting, but it's in no way unfamiliar to anyone.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Except in nomenclature, as the British refer to cornstarch as cornflour.
I can vouche for the difference on two fronts - I tired the corn flour sold in Carrefours in Nice and it was definitely not cornstarch and didn't work.
As someone has learned the intricacies of gluten-free cooking, you can buy corn flour and use it in a celiac diet, and it's not corn starch, it's a separate thing.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The hammer is first to hit the ground.
Only at temperatures above absolute zero. At absolute zero, inertial and gravitational mass are equal. Of course, as others have mentioned, we don't have instruments sensitive enough to see the difference even at normal (for us) temperatures.
God, I feel like a dope.. I didn't read the enough of the site and see the name Bob Lazar. My bullshit detector just went on high! Thanks for the update!
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I assume the height we are dropping the feather and hammer from is equal to their centers of gravity? I'm going to take a small liberty and specify the feather as a peacock feather (approximately 48 inches in length). I'm going to drop my feather oriented such that it's longest axis is pointed towards the center of the Moon. We must drop the hammer and feather from more than 24 inches in order to allow for the length of the feather. Assuming a perfectly spherical lunar surface, it will definitely hit the ground first.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in the American livestock feed industry, "corn flour" is the extremely fine dust remaining from the production of cornmeal. It's essentially fine-ground whole corn, but the texture is about the same as cornstarch or cake flour. It's very digestible and is commonly used in livestock and pet foods, but in recipes I don't imagine it would behave the same as cornstarch.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I wonder which are safe to drink?
Which makes you wonder why water isn't on the list. It may be ubiquitous, but it's weird. Think about it - how many other materials become less dense (ie. expand) when they freeze? I think there are about two or three known. How many others dissociate on their own in their liquid state? How many others have as big a specific heat? Think about the myriad things which are a result of those properties, some of which are a pain in the ass (cracked engine blocks if no antifreeze); some of which are boons (life in general - dissociation, frog hibernation - whole lakes don't freeze solid because ice is weird enough to float, water is one of the best coolants there is - specific heat).
Water is truly a strange chemical. Think about that next time you blithely pour it down your throat.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Yeah, and it self-dissociates in its liquid state - hence pH, easy ionization required for cell behavior, etc. As I stated in an earlier post, it's weird stuff, common and "familiar" or not.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Please read what the GP posted again.
According to TFA, "To make a superfluid you must cool helium down to a couple of a degrees below zero - not one to try at home."
It doesn't state anything about using helium to cool anything. It does mention cooling helium until it becomes a superfluid, which occurs just above absolute zero. The scale is implied, unless you know of a scale that has 0 just above the temperature in which helium becomes a superfluid.
LSD is a pretty strange material.
Anything that makes the concrete sidewalk light up under my feet like I'm in Saturday Night Fever is a pretty strange material indeed. Oh, the pretty colors. Fsck the aerogel, it can't do that.
People talk about it like it's addictive. It's addictive like chocolate, not like nicotine or heroin: the only thing I miss is beautiful colors, more saturated and gorgeous than your eyes are capable of seeing, sort of like how chocolate is more rich and beautiful than your tastebuds can taste. (Nor was I an acid-head, but I did it a few times because I'm a fan of psychedelic music and I wanted to understand what the hell Yellow Submarine ("Oh my God! They're blue meanies!") was all about. I learned, I loved, I rejoice in understanding a time and place I was born too late to experience firsthand.)
Note to anyone wanting to try it: Research reputable scientific sites (ie. FDA's advice on treating patients presenting with acid intoxication), chemistry sites (it would take a lot more rat poison than would fit in a couple of squares of blotter to hurt you let alone kill you), addiction sites (gets you as speedy high as, and is as additively dangerous as, drinking a medium double-double coffee), have a protective (and clean/sober) friend with you as a chaperon during the trip (and offer to do the same for him if he wants to try it), and find an old hippy who can get you good stuff. No, you won't stare at the sun - that would be at least as painful as if you did it clean. No, you won't suddenly believe you can fly, nor will you gouge your eyeballs out. No, you won't get acid flashbacks, unless your trip shows you something extremely traumatic (which is one of your brain's own fabrications anyway). No, acid is not stored in your fat - hell, it's one of the most water-soluble chemicals known and it will be completely out of your body in 24 hours. You are more lucid than you would be if you were stoned or drunk. If you see something unpleasant, remind yourself that it isn't real, and tell it to go away - it will. Most of what you hear about it is FUD based on anti-hippy propaganda. Acid screws with your visual cortex, nothing else.
As a recovering alcoholic, caffeine fiend and smoker, I can assure you that if drug laws were based on actual damage done - or even damage-causing potential based on *scientific* criteria - all three of these things should have been outlawed far before acid.
Ponies? No. Actual hallucinations will be more along the lines of colors which change with the sounds that you hear, and they'll follow outlines of things your eyes are seeing. (ie. sidewalk squares, each lighting up a different color; swirls and "lightning bolts" coming out of small objects in dark-colored contrasting fields, etc.)
Look up the LD50 of LSD and compare it with ethanol (ie. drinking alcohol). Do the same with nicotine. Tell me which are the bigger toxins.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
fluids that get more solid when stressed. The classic example is a mixture of cornflour and water - it's runny until you hit it when it becomes solid.
I remember playing with this mixture in grade school and since then I have always wondered why materials like this could not be used to make protective/bullet proof armor. Could someone explain this to me?
60 calories and 0 nutritional value. How is that a good thing? Wonder bread is to wheat as high fructose corn syrup is to corn. Wonder has almost no fiber. It is almost pure starch which is quickly converted into sugar in you digestive system. If you have low blood sugar and need a boost NOW eating a slice of wonder is faster than eating a powered sugar donut.
-- QED
Tigers are classified as liquids.
Ice-9!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No No No -- those are Anonymous Cannibals. Wrong acronym.
yeah...and eating mcdonalds daily is ok too if you only eat half the fries
and leave the corners of the bread off and have no mayo....come on already
"And then he asked --Are you a bodybuilder???"
We had two blizzards in December in my town. The processed, slice white bread was the first to be emptied from the shelves along with milk, eggs, and TV dinners.
Nah.
;).
Dry ice is sublime
Seriously? There's someone that has a problem stopping after just 2 slices of Wonder Bread? Who gorges themselves on bread? That's crazy. There's pizza and beer to be had.
If that last thing was directed at me, no, I'm not a bodybuilder, just a former fat guy. Not any part of which was due to bread. But maybe that's just me.
The idea that glass is in fact a liquid is in dispute, and is likely not correct. Check here for more details.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Is it wrong to want to create a transparent/translucent non-newtonian fluid, and substitute that into a high dive pool?
Or even drop the cornstarch solution from one of those airplanes used for forest fires?
Off topic, but anyway...
I was making Jello and took a 2 cup pyrex measuring cup from the recently-finished dishwasher. Filled it with tap water and put it in the microwave. I forgot how long I put it in and I didn't see any condensation on the rim so I figured it wasn't long enough and put it in for another minute. When I took it out the handle was much warmer than I thought it should be, so I carefully tapped a pinch of Jello powder into the measuring cup from about 2 feet in the air. Yup, I had superheated water. It erupted into a frothing boiling mass that emptied half of the water from the cup. It was really neat to witness firsthand, but I'm very glad I knew about it beforehand, or else I would probably have dumped the whole packet in while holding the damned thing.
Remember kids, knowing is half the battle.
Even at 0K, the reasoning still stands.