The crafty chemist

Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)

Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).

What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….

And it’s flabbergasting because it’s from 1888, Jacquard machine, IT USED PUNCH CARDS to weave these intricate pages … something like 400 weft per near square inch … IT looks like a page of textured paper, but it’s not, it’s entirely SILK … F*CK …

BUT this is the item btw

“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

– Ada Lovelace, 1843

Babbage was using it to add numbers. Lovelace went further and suggested that anything one could represented by numbers, such as music, could then be manipulated, transformed and generated (“woven”) according to equations, algorithms and steps programmed in by punchcards in the same way the looms made repeating patterns.

!20 years later, the computers in the Apollo spacecraft that took astronauts to the moon were given “rope-core memory”: fabric-like networks of wire hand-woven by women recruited from textile factories, because it was the most information-dense and durable way they had to store information and computer instructions (far higher density than transistors) at the time.

Engineers develop salty gel that could harvest water from desert air

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions. As the material absorbs water vapor, it can swell to make room for more moisture. Even in very dry conditions, with 30% relative humidity, the material can pull vapor from the air and hold in the moisture without leaking. The water could then be heated and condensed, then collected as ultra-pure water. The transparent, rubbery material is made from hydrogel, a naturally absorbent material that is also used in disposable diapers. The team enhanced the hydrogel's absorbency by infusing it with lithium chloride—a type of salt that is known to be a powerful dessicant. The researchers found they could infuse the hydrogel with more salt than was possible in previous studies. As a result, they observed that the salt-loaded gel absorbed and retained an unprecedented amount of moisture, across a range of humidity levels, including very dry conditions that have limited other material designs.

It’s well known that electric fields can guide the movements of skin cells, nudging them towards the site of an injury for instance. In fact, the human body generates an electric field that does this naturally. So researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany set out to amplify the effect.

While it might not heal severe injuries with the speed of a Marvel superhero, it could radically reduce the time it takes for small tears and lacerations to recover.

For people with chronic wounds that take a long time to heal, such as in elderly folk, those with diabetes, or people with poor blood circulation, recovering quickly from frequent small, open cuts could be a literal lifesaver.

“Chronic wounds are a huge societal problem that we don’t hear a lot about,” says Maria Asplund, a bioelectronics scientist at the University of Freiburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

“Our discovery of a method that may heal wounds up to three times faster can be a game changer for diabetic and elderly people, among others, who often suffer greatly from wounds that won’t heal.”

This cute platypus 

Natural remedies have side effects, too.

They are not less dangerous because they are natural.

You still need to consider dosage.

You still need to consider interactions with medications and other things you're taking.

Some of them will not work for you.

OP had an experience with someone in the local witch community who was taking six cups of 'anti-anxiety tea' per day and gave herself lavender poisoning because she didnt think herbal remedies could harm her.

Lavender is fine to take daily in small doses, but if you start feeling any of these symptoms, even if you dont think lavender is the direct cause of it, please stop for awhile and see how you feel. Consult a doctor if it persists.

And always, ALWAYS, do your research before trying any new herbal remedy. Get your information from a trustworthy source; if someone is selling or sponsored by someone selling the thing that they're saying is safe, then they are not trustworthy. Full stop. No exceptions.

Willow is what aspirin is made out of.

If you live in the right country, cola nut (Coca-Cola) is a herbal remedy.

"Ephedra" (ephedrine) is a herbal remedy.

Heroin and opiates are made from poppies.

The sardonic, reductionist headline here could be "Scientists finally figured out why you get more colds in winter: bEcAuSe iT's CoLd!"—but the actual science involved here is both interesting, and potentially very relevant to everyday life and especially the immunocompromised:

It turns out the cold air itself damages the immune response occurring in the nose. [...] In fact, reducing the temperature inside the nose by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) kills nearly 50% of the billions of virus and bacteria-fighting cells in the nostrils, according to the study published Tuesday in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. “Cold air is associated with increased viral infection because you’ve essentially lost half of your immunity just by that small drop in temperature,” said rhinologist Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of otolaryngology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Want to avoid catching or spreading respiratory viruses like CoVid-19, RSV, influenza, or a common cold? Mask up, please, but also bundle up! Wrap up in a scarf, wear a balaclava, and just generally keep your face warm. There's no single magic solution, but that's not a reason to do nothing. Rather, it's a reason to take several simple precautions that help avoid the spread of disease and protect those around you. (I can't tell you how much "this isn't 100% effective so I shouldn't do it at all" frustrates me.)

but I am also super annoyed by the way it's framed as "without light pollution you can see how beautiful the night sky is" way more prominently than it's framed as "hey, did you ever stop to think of how much energy/resources/money are literally wasted by having so much light shine up into the sky?"

Short answer: Yes, among other things.

Long answer: Carbon nanotubes (CNT's) are long, straight tubes of pure carbon, with the atoms arranged like rolled-up sheets of hexagonal chicken wire. Sometimes an atom or two will be misplaced, introducing a defect. The easiest kind of defect to visualize is a kink, like this:

(Source)

This is an AFM (atomic force microscope) image of a nanotube on a glass wafer, placed across four gold electrodes. That sharp kink in the tube is a weak spot.

(Side note: you can tell it's an AFM image because it's got really chunky raster lines. AFM's are fun. You drag an atomically-sharp diamond needle across a surface and measure the needle deflection with a laser. You can get the resolution down to less than a nanometer, if you hold your breath. I once spent a summer internship doing nothing but poking at graphene in an AFM for two months. Very repetitive work, but I got two publications out of it!)

However, it's rarely useful to look at individual CNT's outside of pure research. I worked with nanotube yarn in large-scale production. Large, twisted bundles of tubes, similar to this:

(Source)

This is an SEM (scanning electron microscope) image of high-quality nanotube yarn. Each of those thin whispy strands is probably a couple hundred nanotubes, and the entire structure is twisted smoothly together out of hundreds of thousands. At this point, you're less interested in the quality of individual tubes and more interested in the bulk properties of the yarn itself.

So, once you've verified it visually by SEM, the easiest way to characterize the strength of your nanotube yarn is to pull on it until it breaks.

(Source: High-strength carbon nanotube fibers by twist-induced self-strengthening)

This is a thick ribbon of compressed CNTs, twisted into a chunky pseudo-yarn. The graph shows that the fiber snapped at around 3.7 gigapascals of stress. That's five or six times stronger than steel, and four-ish times stronger than spider silk. Boron nitride nanotubes (BNNT) would be stronger, but that's a post for another day.

Anyway, this might seem impressive, but tbh those are rookie numbers. Twisted-ribbon "yarn" is a cheap and easy way to make strong nanotube fibers, but not nearly as good as a true yarn.

Don't tell the authors I said that.

The other point you brought up is testing for purity.

(source)

This picture is about twenty years old, back when we really had no idea what we were doing. By modern standards, this is hideously embarrassing. It's covered in blobs of leftover iron catalyst. It's an ugly garbage nanotube.

Don't tell the authors I said that.

There can be all sorts of contaminants. Bits of catalyst (usually iron or nickel) random ceramic or metal junk from your furnace, even leftover acid (chlorosulfonic acid is one of the only things that will un-stick carbon nanotubes, though it's an extremely bad chemical that hates you). It's always important to characterize how much nanotube is in your nanotubes.

Handily enough, the best way to test for purity is with the same electron microscope!

One effect of sweeping an electron beam across a target is that the target will emit x-rays as its electrons jump around. These x-rays are extremely predictable, and will have an energy that directly corresponds to the atom that produced them. So assuming that your SEM also has the right kind of x-ray sensor, you click a button and switch over the EDX mode, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.

(source)

This EDX graph shows high concentrations of iron (Fe), oxygen, and carbon in the sample (the silicon is likely from a glass mounting slide). If this were a bunch of CNT's, you'd hope to see almost entirely carbon, with maybe a little bit of iron or nickel. Uh oh!

Happily, this isn't nanotubes.

(source)

“On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”

Source: Instagram