Engineering Study Blog

1. possibly - posiblemente

2. basically - básicamente/fundamentalmente

3. sunshine - sol

4. kiss - beso

5. daydream - ensueño

6. to daydream - soñar despierto / fantasear

7. to whisper - susurrar

8. to object - objetar, oponerse

9. to shout - gritar

1. No hay branca - No problem

2. ¿Qué hubo? - What’s up?

3. ponerle los cuernos - to cheat on someone

4. A mí, me parece que - I think that

5. No estoy persuadida de que sea el caso - I’m not convinced that’s the case

6. por lo tanto - therefore

7. normalmente - normally

8. a veces - sometimes

9. de vez en cuando - from time to time

Maybe some of you are in a place where you need to hear these things. Trust me, it does turn out okay. 💛

I asked him what I meant. Like I point blank said “Are you saying I don’t work enough overtime?”

“…no,” he said, since we got in trouble if we worked OT. It was treated as a moral failing on our parts.

“So are you saying I should be working for free?” I asked. This is a trap question. It was a corporate job. Which meant he actually was limited in the shit he could pull.

“….no,” he grudgingly replied.

“So what is the problem?” I asked. And he had to admit that, technically, I had done nothing wrong.

But he tried to guilt me over LIKING TO GO HOME AT THE END OF THE DAY. After each 8-10 hour shift where I was allowed ZERO breaks, despite the law requiring I get a minimum of 15 minutes every 4 hours.

He also got pissed off that I was very open with telling people I had given my notice. I didn’t bad mouth the place. I wasn’t negative. I was just open that, yes, I was moving and had therefor quit.

I’m dead serious; people are dropping dead like flies because of overwork. 

In honor of reaching the end of the periodic table, and the fact that I’ve made over a hundred MaterialsPosts by now, I thought I’d share with you guys some of the facts.

At this point, I have posted about fourteen different ceramics, and the most popular posts were…

Ultra high temperature ceramics (incidentally my third most popular MaterialsPost overall)

Porcelain

Bone China

Lanthanum hexaboride

Zirconia

… in that order. So if you missed them the first time around, check them out!

(And just because I was interested in the answer, here’s the least popular ceramics post (so far): Aluminum nitride.)

When your flask looks more like a petri dish

While evaporating the solvent from her reaction product, Nuray Altinolcek saw these circular crystals, which reminded her of bacterial colonies cultured on a petri dish. Altinolcek, a PhD student at Uludağ University in the lab of Mustafa Tavasli, is looking for new materials for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). She plans to use the compound in these crystals as a ligand to form a transition-metal complex. Small amounts of these phosphorescent complexes can be added to OLEDs to allow scientists to control the color of light that the devices produce. In other words, putting different ligands on a transition-metal atom can change its luminescent properties. —Manny Morone

Submitted by Nuray Altinolcek

Do science. Take pictures. Win money. Enter our photo contest here.

Related C&EN Content:

The rise of OLED displays

Brighter Organics On Display

Glasses: Cranberry glass

Cranberry glass, also known as gold ruby glass, is glass that has been colored red with the addition of gold. This type of glass has been produced for over two thousand years, with varying types of glass and varying amounts of gold and other elements. Over the centuries the knowledge of the methods involved of making cranberry glass have waxed and waned and it wasn’t until the early 1600s that a description of how to make ruby glass was first published by Antonio Neri (The Art of Glass). A German glassmaker, Johann Kunckel, later improved the recipe in the late 1600s, and ruby glass is also sometimes known as Kunckel glass.

In the modern era, cranberry glass, or rather, any red glass, can also be made with other colorants, such as copper, selenium, or select rare earth elements. But with gold itself, the chemistry of this type of glass is actually rather complex. The gold in the glass is in the form of nanoparticles and the size of these particles, as well as the way the glass is processed and the temperatures used to create it, have large effects on the color of the resulting product. Often, Cranberry glass as a term is specifically used to refer to gold ruby glass that is annealed at low temperatures or for shorter times, leading to a pale pinkish color, rather than the deep red of other gold ruby glasses.

This red glass is relatively very expensive, and as such it is mainly used for decorative and craft purposes and is rarely mass produced.

Sources/Further Reading: ( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) ( 4 - images 2 and 4 ) ( 5 )

Order hidden in disorder

Partitioning space into cells with optimum geometrical properties is a central challenge in many fields of science and technology. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and colleagues from several countries have now found that in amorphous, i.e. disordered, systems optimization of the individual cells gradually results in the same structure, although it remains amorphous. The disordered structure quickly converges to hyperuniformity - a hidden order on large scales. This is reported in Nature Communications.

No matter whether you search for an optimum foam or for a method to pack spheres as closely as possible - ideal tessellation of three-dimensional space, that means complete partitioning into cells with special geometrical properties, has been studied for a long time by scientists. It is not only of theoretical interest, but relevant to many practical applications, among others for telecommunications, image processing, or complex granules. Researchers of KIT’s Institute of Stochastics have now studied a special problem of tessellation, the quantizer problem. “The goal is to partition space into cells and all points in a cell to be located as closely as possible to the cell center, intuitively speaking,” says Dr. Michael Andreas Klatt, former staff member of the Institute, who now works at Princeton University in the USA. Solutions of the quantizer problem can be used for the development of novel materials and may contribute to a better understanding of the unique properties of complex cell tissue in future.