Hasta La Ideas

Fight commentator, podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan has referred to the Ultimate Fighting Championship as two guys climbing into the octagon “and essentially throwing their bones at each other.” One could argue that the damage each fighter tries to inflict on the other is much more incisive than it is in American football, and one needn’t go further than YouTube to see examples of those bones being broken in the ring; what’s miraculous, given the forces every fighter’s bones are subjected to, is how often they don’t break.

Why don’t they break more often, given the impacts they’re sustaining? And what could an industrial designer learn from this? Dr. Markus Buehler, a civil engineer and materials scientist at MIT, may have the answer. Buehler’s research specialty is as odd and focused as a Chuck Liddell overhand right:

…Our goal is to understand the mechanics of deformation and failure of biology’s construction materials at a fundamental level. The deformation and failure of engineering materials has been studied extensively, and the results have impacted our world by enabling the design of advanced materials, structures and devices. However, the mechanisms of materials failure in biological systems are not well understood and thus present an opportunity to institute a new paradigm of materials science at the interface of engineering and biology.

In weight and external texture, a human bone might seem very similar to ceramics. But as Buehler noted in a 2010 research paper [PDF], “Catastrophic breakage of brittle materials such as ceramics is usually triggered by the rapid spreading of cracks.” Bones don’t shatter this way, at least not commonly. And this year, Buehler began to understand why. After exhaustive laboratory experimentation and analysis via supercomputer, Buehler “finally unraveled the structure of bone… with almost atom-by-atom precision.”

Collagen party up top, hydroxyapatite business on the bottom

Buehler and his team have been investigating how two key constituents of bone—soft, flexible collagen and hard, rigid hydroxyapatite—work together, on a molecular level, to make bones extraordinarily resilient. Because of the specific way that the latter material is embedded within the former, “Hydroxyapatite takes most of the forces in the material, whereas collagen takes most of the stretching.”

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This Wood Species series of entries comes to us from guest writer Rob Wilkey, an Atlanta-based woodworker and industrial designer whose expertise is in small home goods, furniture, and large installations.

Over the next few articles, we’ll be analyzing a number of common North American wood species. This week’s featured species:

Maple lumber is sold under two distinct names: Soft Maple, which is harvested from a number of different species and has a Janka hardness of 700 to 900lbf; and Hard Maple, which comes from the Sugar Maple tree and has a much higher Janka hardness at 1450lbf. Hard Maple is the maple of choice for most woodworkers due to its density and structural stability, although the softer maples make a fine substitute in less demanding applications. Soft Maple is also cheaper, partly due to the fact that the softer species tend to grow faster, but also because many of the harvestable Sugar Maples are reserved for the production maple syrup.

Maple is a pale cream color when first cut, but will darken to light yellow or pale reddish brown with exposure to sunlight. Maple is diffuse-porous with small pores, and sands to a smooth, even surface. It is easy to cut and shape, but can be prone to tearout due to its occasionally interlocked grain pattern. Despite its density, even Hard Maple is susceptible to decay and suffers from a fair amount of seasonal movement, especially when left unfinished. Maple lumber should be joined securely and finished thoroughly to prevent any shifting with changes in temperature and humidity. The various species of maple are known to exhibit a wide range of figured grain patterns and are also prone to spalting. Spalted and figured pieces of maple are usually more expensive than plain boards, but their striking visual effects can make a project very unique and eye-catching.

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In an earlier post, I commented on how Japanese children at the school where I worked were taught to pitch in with recycling. But I failed to mention a rather strange counterpoint, emblematic of that country’s bewildering contradictions: One day a horrific smell wafted over the campus. I went outside to investigate, and discovered that a farmer in the lot adjacent to the school was burning an enormous pile of tires. The wind carried the vile, black smoke all over the school and the playing grounds. I asked a teacher about this and he shrugged. “There is no place to put them,” he said.

I’ve since learned tires can of course be re-molded and re-treaded. But I had no idea how labor- and energy-intensive it was until I saw this video. Those of you who are into molding will enjoy seeing how the mold comes apart/together around 3:15. I also dug watching how they remove the flashing, and that inflatable thingy that serves as the mold’s core:

The amount of man-hours that goes into each tire, not to mention the one-hour-plus molding time, is staggering. But what I found most surprising was that despite all of that energy burned, re-molding is still 30 to 60% cheaper than creating the tire from scratch.

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An Olympic gold medal is already a difficult, rare item to attain. And next year, winter Olympians will have an opportunity to win a gold medal that’s even more rare. Come February, the seven finalists standing on the tallest part of the podium in Sochi, Russia will be awarded medals made of gold and metal from outer space.

Earlier this year, a meteor the size of a bus slammed into the Russian city of Chelyabinsk with the force of 20 atom bombs, generating much spectacular dashcam footage on YouTube. Fragments of that meteorite have been harvested and will be machined into the medals themselves, creating a gold and chondrite disc that only a handful of people on the Earth will ever wear around their necks. “We will hand out [the special] medals to all the athletes who will win gold on that day,” said Chelyabinsk Region Culture Minister Alexei Betekhtin, “because both the meteorite strike and the Olympic Games are the global events.”

Chelyabinsk and Sochi are not geographically close; the chondrite-infused medals will travel some 2,700 kilometers from the first city to the second. But the original meteor, of course, traveled quite a bit further than that.

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We’ve looked at carbon fiber in 3D-printed bikes, in furniture design, and coming out of Lexus’ crazy 360-degree loom. The stuff has long been vaunted for its high strength-to-weight ratio. And now, for the first time in decades, carbon fiber could experience a big change, thanks to one of the more popular breakthroughs in material science, graphene.

We’ve looked at graphene’s application in battery-ending supercapacitors before, but for those who don’t remember: Graphene is a one-atom thick layer of graphite (carbon) that is strong, and very, very light. And the tricky thing about graphene is making it, since it is so thin.

Recently, scientists at Rice University have managed to weave flakes of graphene oxide into carbon fiber. The result is something that surprised even the scientists who created it. The new fiber is considered to be extraordinarily strong, because knots created using the material are unusually strong.

We might think of knots as a handy way to tie something up. But in materials science they are way of measuring strength. Typically most fibers snap under the tension created at a knot. But with this new carbon fiber the strength at the knot is as strong as anywhere else along the thread of fiber.

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