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December 14 - December 22, 2021
At some point humans made the discovery that would end the Stone Age and open the door to a seemingly unlimited supply of the stuff. They discovered that a certain greenish rock, when put into a very hot fire and surrounded by red-hot embers, turns into a shiny piece of metal. This greenish rock was malachite, and the metal was, of course, copper.
crystal of aluminum oxide is colorless if pure but becomes blue when it contains impurities of iron atoms: it is the gemstone called sapphire. Exactly the same aluminum oxide crystal containing impurities of chromium is the gem called ruby.
The invention of paper, said to be one of the four great inventions of the Chinese, solved these problems, but it wasn’t until the Romans replaced the scroll with the codex—or, as we call it now, the book—that the material reached its full potential.
What no one had really mentioned was that chocolatl means “bitter water,” and even though it was sweetened with the new cheap sugar flooding in from the slave-run plantations of Africa and South America, it was also a gritty, oily, and heavy drink, because 50 percent of the cocoa bean is cocoa fat.
The material turned out to be a substance known as aerogel.
There is a lot of quartz in the world because the two most abundant chemical elements in the Earth’s crust are oxygen and silicon, which react together to form silicon dioxide molecules (SiO2).
Newton’s moment of genius was to notice that a glass prism not only turned “white” light into a mixture of colors, but could also reverse the process. From this, he deduced that all of the colors created by a piece of glass were already in the light in the first place.
The biggest diamond yet discovered is located in the Milky Way in the constellation of Serpens Cauda, where it is orbiting a pulsar star called PSR J1719–1438. It is an entire planet five times the size of Earth.
each atom in graphite has no electrons left over to form strong bonds between its layers. Instead, these layers are held together by the universal glue of the material world, a weak set of forces generated by fluctuations in the electric field of molecules, called van der Waals forces.
Paper cups may seem sustainable because paper is recyclable, but the wax coating required to make them waterproof makes this almost impossible. For real sustainability, we must look to ceramics.
Two thousand years ago, while looking for a way to improve their ceramics, the potters of the Eastern Han Dynasty started experimenting not just with different kinds of clays but with clays of their own concoction, mixing into them minerals that might never end up in a river. One such additive was the white mineral kaolin.
The invention in 1840 of an alloy comprised mainly of silver, tin, and mercury, called amalgam, was the turning point. In its preliminary form, amalgam is a liquid metal at room temperature because of its mercury content. However, when it’s mixed with its other components, a reaction takes place between the mercury and the silver and tin that results in a new crystal, which is fully solid, hard-wearing, and tough.
These composite fillings are a combination of a strong transparent plastic and a silica powder that makes them hard and resistant to wear, while also matching the color of teeth better than the amalgams. These fillings, like amalgam, are molded into the cavity while liquid. Once they’re in place, though, a small ultraviolet light is introduced into the mouth, which activates a chemical reaction within the resin that sets it hard almost instantly.
Hip joint replacements have been around for quite a while. The first attempt to replace a hip joint was in 1891 and used ivory, but titanium and ceramic are used more now.
Cartilage is a complex living material. Like a gel, it has an internal skeleton made of fibers, in its case made mostly of collagen. (Collagen is a molecular cousin of gelatin and the most common protein molecule in the human body, responsible for giving skin and other tissues their elastic firmness—which
On Earth, ninety-four different types of atoms naturally exist, but eight of these elements make up 98.8 percent of the mass of the Earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, and aluminum.
Nanostructures are still far too small to see or even feel, so to integrate them into a material object that we can interact with, we have to group them together and connect them into microscopic structures, which are ten to a hundred times bigger, but nevertheless still invisible.
