Turning Girl Scout Cookies Into Graphene

Turning Girl Scout Cookies Into Graphene:

smilesandvials:

“What Jim Tour down in Houston discovered and showed is that anything that’s got carbon in it you can turn into graphene.

And to demonstrate that he meant anything, he did it with Girl Scout cookies. He turned those into graphene. He did it with chocolate. He got some chocolate half-dollar coins. He did it with dog feces from a miniature Dachshund, and he did it with a cockroach leg. And essentially he just got a really big oven, heated it up to about 1,000 degrees C and filled that oven with a little bit of this stuff, the cockroach or the dog feces, whatever, and a sheet of pure copper and a little bit of gas, left it for about 20 minutes, and viola, he’d made little bits of really high-quality graphene.”

Keyword here is “little bits” but this will always crack me up. 

What.

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brooklynmutt: “Stunning photo of a 1400-year-old ginkgo tree...

brooklynmutt:

“Stunning photo of a 1400-year-old ginkgo tree shedding its leaves at a Buddhist temple near Xi'an, China.” - @nick_kapur

This thing is crazy.

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iheartapple2: If you’re going to read iTunes terms and...

iheartapple2:

If you’re going to read iTunes terms and conditions this may be the way to do it.

So… This exists…

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materialsscienceandengineering: Caution: Weird material...

materialsscienceandengineering:

Caution: Weird material shrinks when warm

Most materials swell when they warm, but some do the opposite; quantum effects could explain why

Most materials swell when they warm, and shrink when they cool. But UConn physicist Jason Hancock has been investigating a substance that responds in reverse: it shrinks when it warms.

Although thermal expansion, and the cracking and warping that often result, are an everyday occurrence – in buildings, bridges, electronics, and almost anything else exposed to wide temperature swings – physicists have trouble explaining why solids behave that way.

Research by Hancock and his colleagues into scandium trifluoride, a material that has negative thermal expansion, published 1 October in Physical Review B, may lead to a better understanding of why materials change volume with temperature at all, with potential applications such as more durable electronics.

Read more.

What.

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