UK educational supply center centre Mindsets online sells variously-sized 3mm thick sample sheets of Eastman’s Spectar copolyester at not-completely-outlandish prices. Spectar supposedly looks and handles much like acrylic, but with the surprising property that it can be cold-formed without breaking or whitening, and exhibits a memory effect, holding a cold bend until reheated.
This video is short, and really pretty boring if you don’t know what’s going on. Shown is a chunk of new alloy that undergoes a phase change, at about 125C, from a nonmagnetic material to one that is strongly magnetic. If you bias the system with an additional, permanent magnet, heating the system past the transition temperature produces an electric current in a nearby coil, thereby converting heat to electricity.
It’s mesmerizing to watch Pe Lang‘s mechanical artwork in motion, especially this machine that arranges droplets of water on an omniphobic surface. From Triangulation: Falling objects – positioning systems from 2009-2011 is a custom made machine that adds drops of water onto a special textured surface. Each drop forms into an almost perfect sphere through […]
New York Times technology columnist and creator of the O’Reilly Missing Manuals book series David Pogue is hosting a new four-part series called “Making Stuff,” which airs on PBS tomorrow, January 19th. The series takes a look into the often unsung field of material science. Each week, Pogue investigates a different quality of materials, with […]
Unlike all the other men in my family (and most of my friends) I am not an electrical engineer by training. I’ve spent my life around electrical engineering, and although I’ve known about the historical details of the invention of the transistor since I was a wee lad, I can’t claim to have understood how the first transistor worked until I saw Bill Hammack’s video for this week. So, thanks for that, Bill, on a personal level.
Bill Hammack’s video confection is especially sweet this week. Bill scored a vintage Delta “black box” on eBay and, in this week’s installment, tears it apart on camera to show you how they built ’em in the old days to stand up to “three-thousand gees and one-thousand degrees.” I just watched it, and I’m having a hard time resisting my ebullient urge to spoil the ending for you, so I’ll just shut up and let Engineer Guy take it away. [Thanks, Bill!]
This “50% sawdust” project from Israel’s Kulla design involves mixing equal parts sawdust and shredded plastic bags in a mold under heat and mild pressure to produce a composite chip-board type material that, reportedly, requires no other adhesives, binders, or other components. Lots of questions left to be answered, but an interesting start. [via Dude […]
