 All right, well, I have noon, so let's not dawdle. So we can take full advantage of our hour. So if everyone can hear me, welcome to our ongoing series of panel discussions through the Science Circle. And welcome. Our topic today is sort of recent developments in material science or interesting topics in material science. We have two distinguished guests today that I'm going to be interviewing. Before we begin, I do want to remind everyone that the Science Circle is a grant-funded nonprofit dedicated to the development of virtual world platforms for education. So I'll ask you to be on your best behavior. And also, we are speaking through a Zoom voice link-up. But I do want to remind all of the attendees to keep your microphones off. If you want to speak, please use a text in the nearby chat, and we'll be happy to answer your questions that way through the text. So with those announcements done, I would like to introduce our speakers. We have Mike Shaw, who is an educator and scientist at Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville and is well known to the Science Circle here. And we also have Kurt Winkleman, who also should be known to Science Circle. He's a professor of chemistry and head of the Department of Chemistry at Val Dosta College. And he has a degree in chemistry from Virginia Tech and a PhD from Auburn University. Kurt also, apparently, as I understand it, from grant funding created the chemistry region here in Second Life, which is currently actually being operated by Mike. And we have a one-year commitment through his university to keep that going. So really, we have two gentlemen who are really responsible for keeping chemistry and chemistry education active in Second Life here to talk with us today. And as I mentioned, our subject is material science. So Mike, I wanted to start with you. I think a good place for us to start is a definition. So tell us a little bit what you consider a good definition for material science and maybe a little bit about your interest in it. OK, well, I'll speak a little bit off the cuff for this. As chemists, everything around us and everything that exists through a chemist is a material. But some materials are more useful than others. My students in my lab make all sorts of materials all the time. And some of them we just scrape off and put in the waste because they're not really useful for anything. At least we hope not, because if they were useful for something, then we've missed an opportunity. For what I think of as formal material science, there has to be an application. So it's not just enough that a material has a well-defined composition and exists. It has to be able to do something. So to quote a recent article in ACS Central Science, finding the best material for a specific application is the ultimate goal of materials discovery. So I think the applications are an important part of this. So coming up with an actual definition, OK, well, a material is a substance which can be used for a useful purpose. This is sort of the sine qua non of materials. Kurt, do you have any reactions or do you want to add to that in terms of your thoughts about materials? Yeah. I would agree with that. I mean, material scientists, they study materials. You know, I could imagine doing some studies on materials just out of your own curiosity. But for the most part, it's sort of purpose-driven. I'd also add that the discipline of material science encompasses chemistry and physics, really all the sciences. I mean, we're now trying to make artificial tissue, and now we're getting into building materials that are replicating biological naturally occurring materials. And so I would say it is an interdisciplinary subject that includes engineering, sciences, all sorts of things. Yes, that's an excellent point. In fact, I considered seeing if we could invite an engineer to join us, because I do think it is very interdisciplinary. And that's also a nice segue to our next topic. Can you talk to us a little bit maybe about basic versus applied research in material science? And I'm sort of particularly interested in whether, for example, a researcher sort of maybe perhaps has in mind a specific set of properties that he wants to try to design a material to have, or whether materials are more often maybe discovered serendipitously, maybe accidentally in a lab, and then its properties are recognized, and then maybe explored in more depth, and maybe there's an interplay between the two of those. Yeah, I'll also just add as a side that the chat is pretty awesome. You guys are making me laugh. So yeah, I was kind of looking up what are some of the formal definitions of basic and applied research as I prepared for this. And one of the things that struck me was the idea that basic research is motivated simply by seeking knowledge for its own sake. So when it's the basic research and the search for knowledge that cause people to want to study just how semiconductors behave, weren't necessarily any uses for semiconductors when they were doing this, or why the scientists 100 years ago who were studying developing quantum mechanics, there was no application for that. It was just fascinating, or Einstein and relativity. These are all examples of basic research, which was conducted simply to say that we now understand things better, which it's a noble goal, but it also has some very practical benefits because basic research really lays a foundation for advancing science or engineering in a particular direction, which is what you would do in applied research, where you say, I want a material that does this. What material should I use? Or what material should I work with? And you would then look at the basic research that has been done, and you would say, oh, I want to use a semiconductor because I'm trying to make light emitting diodes. And light emitting diodes would not exist without our understanding of the electronic properties of semiconductors. If you want to make a super precise atomic clock, you have to understand quantum mechanics. But making a super precise atomic clock it's really useful for things like GPS and keeping track of things to very precise measurements. And then I'll just add keeping satellites in orbit relies on relativity. So these ideas of basic research, I think basic research sometimes gets a bad rap because it's not practical. It doesn't accomplish anything. But actually, as someone in the chat said earlier, you don't know what you're going to need in the future. We just can't know that, I mean, who would have guessed we needed materials for touchscreens for iPads? Because there were no iPads at the time. But we had that basic research on how to design those materials already accomplished. So it was easy for Apple to quickly put together an iPad. So yeah, I mean, that's the difference between basic and applied. But there is an interplay. If certainly basic research helps you get to applied or answer the question or solve the problem you need. But as you work on your applied research, you might find that there are some deficiencies in the basic research. You might say, hey, we just need to learn more about this type of material because I think this material might be important someday or might be important now. But we just don't know anything about it. So you get a bunch of scientists doing basic research on that. And then it kind of goes back, ebbs back and forth. Yeah, when I was sort of prepping for it today, I looked at several articles, kind of lists of interesting materials and things like that. And you do come across a couple that like seem really interesting and cool. But often the description would say, there is no known use for this material. It's just really interesting. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think materials like graphene and nanotubes, buckyballs and so forth, that sort of organized carbon, were discovered by accident. And then sort of discovered to have these super interesting properties. And I think maybe also the fact, I remember in the 90s there was fantastic interest in ceramics as high-temperature superconductors. And I think that property of ceramics was discovered by accident. So those things kind of come out of basic research. And then as the properties are discovered, people work with them to try to find applications for them to take advantage of those properties. It's actually really important when you're doing basic research to keep an open mind, because sometimes the problem you're working on can result in a solution to another problem that you may not even know exists. And the key to being really successful at basic research is to have a broad enough background to be able to recognize when something that you've made is really what someone else has been looking for rather than what you have been looking for. Like the story with Bakelite. Bakelite is an early plastic. I think it's an early thermosetting plastic. Just make big radios out of it, right? And that was one that was discovered by accident. I think it's benzene, sulfuric acid, and formaldehyde that gives you that particular resin. I think there are some recent very strong plastics that have been developed recently, too, that withstand very high temperatures, for example. And so, Mike, why don't you tell us a little bit about maybe your favorite new materials, or maybe what you're working on currently, or any specific materials that you kind of want to let's kind of get into it here and start talking about some cool stuff. So tell us a little bit about what you're interested in. OK, well, I'm an inorganic chemist. So there are some really wonderful new materials that are inorganic-based and which people are researching so as to be able to solve current problems. One thing I'll, one that I'll describe is metal-organic frameworks. Think of a rock. Well, a rock, what it's made of, like something like granite. You might have alumino silicates. So it's got aluminum and silicon and oxygen that are bound to each other in a particular pattern. And there's maybe some iron in there or some sodium or potassium in there to balance charge out. This is an inorganic chemical. But the thing is that there's not really a lot of space in between the silicones or aluminum. They're joined by oxygen atoms. And so everything's all cramped up together. Maybe if we can think of something like, well, my picture has disappeared. I'm going to put a picture up on the whiteboard. La, la, la, la. And this is related. There we go. This is related chemistry. And it's in two dimensions. So what's been done here is that, let's see. I'm going to draw a circle around this bit. What's been done here is that we've made a little organic molecule. The organic molecule is polyfunctional. It can attach to more than one metal atom. And the way it attaches is to give you like three of these things attached to a single metal atom. And then there's space on the outside for more connections to happen. Well, if you let this go, then you can build up little triangles which attach to other triangles. And you can get these guys to make, these are called serpentski phones. The scans I'm showing you here are atomic force microscopy scans. So these are actual single molecules that are two-dimensional and are supported on a surface, which and what we're seeing is these triangular pores of different sizes. This is a two-dimensional version of a metal organic framework. And what can happen in metal organic frameworks is that you have cavities of different sizes throughout a three-dimensional material. Why would you need this? One application is to separate CO2 out of waste gases. If you have a material that CO2 can travel through but nothing else can, then you have a way of purifying CO2, sequestering it, and using it. Let's say that you want your car to run on hydrogen in the future. Filling up your gas tank with high pressure hydrogen is not really a safe way to go. If you had some sort of material that could absorb hydrogen and release it on demand, but not explode if someone taps your car in a fender bender, that might be a kind of a cool thing. There's a lot of different applications for these metal organic frameworks. And they're essentially kind of designed from the bottom up. They're related to ceramics, but they also have a huge kind of organic component to them. Yeah, it seems that inorganic structures make sort of good cages. I just a technical note on my screen, the whiteboard just appears to be a grid of blue squares. And it's not updating. So OK, so I'll fix that on my end. It might be disabled because I've got it muted. Right, so you can just have the sound on, but have the volume all the way down. That way you don't get the feedback in your ears. Very good. All right, I'm not sure what I just did there. But Kurt, tell us a little bit about maybe what you're working on or what some of your favorite materials are lately. OK, yeah, I'd be happy to. One of the areas of materials that I'm really interested in is called nanotechnology. And this is generally a field. Again, it's one of these multidisciplinary fields. I've worked with chemists and biologists and engineers and all sorts of interesting people. The idea is that if you might be familiar with the periodic table. So this is the way chemists organize the fundamental elements that exist in nature. And each element is given a spot on the periodic table because each element has unique properties. And there's no two elements that are exactly the same. So if we start with that idea, it turns out that we can extend the periodic table in kind of new and interesting ways because we can take any element, gold, for instance, or silver. And if we change the size of the particles that we're dealing with, we actually find that there's a change in the properties of the material. So think about if you're wearing jewelry, it might be gold. So think about taking that piece of jewelry and slicing off a very tiny sliver of gold and then taking that sliver of gold under a microscope and slicing off an even smaller sliver from that. Eventually, you would get to a point where you physically couldn't be cutting it because it would be too small to even hold on to. But when you get your particles that contain on the order of, say, 10,000 atoms, we actually see that gold, which we are all familiar with properties of the element gold, those properties start to change. And in fact, just about all the properties change. And so if we think about choosing a material with certain properties, chemists are no longer limited to just the 100 elements on the periodic table or even one of the millions and millions of compounds that we've made, we can now take something as simple as an element, lower the size of the particles to a point where we start to see different properties. And let me try and put, let's see if I can put something up on our screen here. That's a little spooky. It seems to imply that atoms know when they're in the other atoms. OK, so well, they do know when they're in the presence of other atoms because atoms interact with each other. They feel that there's attractive forces between atoms. And so, yeah, they actually can tell. Atoms behave differently if they're on the surface of a material or if they're on the interior. Yeah, or in solution or something like that. That's right, yeah, very interesting. And so actually, it turns out this idea of, I'm sorry, I'm trying to do two things at once. It turns out the idea of particles being on the interior versus the surface plays a key role because the more surface atoms you have, the more your properties of the particle will be governed by those surface atoms. A big chunk of gold is mostly governed by the interior atoms because there's so many more atoms on the interior of a gold ring than there is on the surface. So what I've put up here on the screen is just an example of how the melting point of gold changes. So over on the right side, when we have particles that are very, very large, the melting point is about what you would expect for gold. It's about 1,000 degrees Celsius. But as the particles get smaller and smaller, we get down to a collection of, gosh, I want to say like 100 atoms or so all packed together. The melting point of those particles, of those gold particles, would be about room temperature. And it's not just the melting point that changes its properties like the color. Actually, gold, when it's really small, the particles are going to be, they can be kind of a grayish blue. They might be a reddish, like a reddish wine color. All kinds of properties change. So this gives us a whole new door to designing different materials that have desirable properties. And you might say, well, we already have things that can melt at room temperature. Oh, yeah. So there's some other pretty pictures. You might say, well, we already have plenty of materials. Why do we need to think about nanoparticles and things like that? Well, we do have materials that do a lot of things that we like, but those materials might be expensive or they might be really toxic or they might not be readily available. And so having more options is always a good idea. And what we're seeing on this, what I guess was that, Matt, that you posted this. Yeah, that was me. OK. That was Mike. Yeah, so on the left, we have a series of vials of, that's probably cadmium selenide, which is a semiconductor. The color of the solution changes from purple. Well, actually, this is going to be probably the fluorescent. So when you shine UV light on something like a black light, it glows. These particles glow a different color depending on their size. So the smallest glows purple, the largest glows red. So I mean, there's lots of kind of neat things you can do with nanoparticles. I'm also, as I've gotten into nanoparticles, one of the funny things we've discovered over the years is that, like we were talking about earlier, some materials are discovered just by accident, like buckyballs and carbon nanotubes. These are different arrangements of carbon atoms. But it also turns out that those have existed. We've been making them every time we burn something in a fire. Like these nanotubes and graphene sheets, little tiny bits of them are made all the time when stuff burns. It's just kind of by accident. What we also find is that there are a lot of naturally occurring clumps of atoms, clusters of atoms that we didn't think would exist in nature. But nature has a really neat way of doing things that no one expects. And so I've actually gotten into some of the understanding more of how naturally occurring nanomaterials exist and how they form and what they do in the environment. Because if nature can make them in a way that's maybe more efficient or with less pollution, then that might be a practice that we want to emulate with our industrial processes for making these materials. Oh, yeah, fantastic. That completely makes sense. Kirk, what is the current status or thinking on both Buckminster Fullerene that creates Buckyballs and nanotubes and graphene? Those were both really sexy about 10 years ago. But I'm not really sure what the current thinking on them is. So do you have any thoughts about that? I think like a lot of things, it kind of actually reminds me of Second Life itself. There's like a big hype when the discovery is made and everybody thinks about how this material or something is going to transform the world. Some of it's well-founded because it is an interesting material and it's a new arrangement of atoms we've never seen before. But then when it gets down into the details of how does this material operate in the human body, is it toxic? Well, maybe that ends up causing some trouble. Or there can just be some unexpected roadblocks that kind of undermine the hype. And if the hype was too much to begin with, then that's kind of even worse. It's even harder to meet expectations. I mean, I think graphene and carbon nanotubes and materials like that are still useful. But they might have been overhyped, which wasn't necessarily their fault or the scientist's fault. It was just sort of how the media got hold of them and everybody's imagination ran away with them. Yeah, please. I'm going to jump in there because I'd say that the graphene and the buckyballs and the nanotubes are still undergoing the basic research. There are so many papers on them that if you were trying just to figure out what's going on with them, you'd be overwhelmed. So I took the liberty of just putting one figure from one paper that I saw from my scan of the literature. It was like last night. There's the reference information. And the title there is Bottom Up on Surface, Synthesized Armchair, Graphene and Nanoribbons. Graphene seemed to be really, really useful and interesting to both chemists and physicists right now because they have two-dimensional conductivity properties that might be really useful in computer chips. So and in the figure I've put up here, you can kind of see what the structure of graphene is. It's like a one layer of graphite. People are still really excited about this. It's even worked its way into the chemical education literature because getting a chip of graphene is as simple as taking a piece of scotch tape, getting some graphite on there, and then just like using two pieces of scotch tape to systematically peel away layer after layer. You do this about five or six times. You end up with just a monolayer of graphene. And I know there's in modified electrodes, which are useful for sensing technologies, that carbon nanotubes are getting a lot of attention. So yeah, it may be that there was a lot of hype initially. But I think that it's gone quiet because the field is just so big now. Yes, that makes sense that there's just so much to look at. And it's going to take some time for it to sort of all sort out and for meaningful applications to percolate up, in a sense. Now, I kind of want to pause for a moment to look at our local chat and maybe respond to some of the comments here. Scrolling back up, I wanted to highlight something that Day Miami mentioned, which is geology. She says, the American Geological Institute has lots of programs during Earth Science Week, and the theme was Earth Materials in Our Lives. And that made me think that geological or natural processes or maybe processes in the universe can also reveal novel materials to us. The intense, maybe intense pressures or temperatures you encounter in nature. We might discover surprising new materials that way. Any kind of thoughts about the impact of natural forces in our discovery of new materials? Yeah, I mean, there's naturally occurring, I guess the forces that exist on Earth, we're used to what's on the surface of the Earth and normal temperatures and pressures. But we can find a lot of unusual types of materials at, say, the bottom of the ocean. And because there can be intense pressures there from the water, there can also be actually extremely high temperatures if you're near some kind of a thermal vent. And so there's a lot of interest in those environments in part because of you get some very unusual life forms living there. And that maybe those could be, if we understood those, we might better understand what planets might have life on them. But actually just the materials that are found there are interesting in and of themselves because the type of materials you could only make in a lab where you had very expensive instrumentation to get you very high temperatures and very high pressures. Yes, thank you. That's great. There's also some concern in the chat about maybe bad negative environmental effects that new materials might turn out to be toxic to the environment or maybe toxic to people. I'm not quite sure how to address this, but I don't know if there are sort of protocols in place to sort of maybe contain new materials. Or it does seem to me that just by the very nature of the way new materials are developed that it seems unlikely that they're really going to be sort of released into the wild or used in some application before we really understand their impacts. But that may not be the case. The tagline points out, for example, that how important rare earth elements are, for example, in making iPhones work. And also we may be using novel plastics in these products like an iPhone. And there are just millions and millions of those. And maybe we don't really know what the long-term consequences will be. It does seem to me that one of the benefits of doing materials for science research might be to find replacements for rare earth elements or better replacements for maybe toxic plastics and things like that. Well, even the replacements can be toxic. There is a lot of interest in all organic LEDs, like emitting diodes. And the lanthanides tend to be the rare earths, tend to be used a lot for light emitting diodyte doping and fabrication. But the problem with a lot of materials is their chemistry, yes, but also just the size of them. So nanoparticulate materials can be problematic health-wise. For example, naturally occurring nanoparticulate materials include asbestos. So things that asbestos can do in terms of physically interfering in cellular processes can also be done just by the virtue of the size and shape of carbon nanotubes, perhaps, and other particles. Matt, you mentioned naturally occurring substances. I've got a picture up that looks like a tile, but this is called a quasi-crystal. And this is a. It almost looks like an Arabic mosque tile. It's got five-fold symmetry. And the packing is such in five-fold symmetry that the pattern will never repeat. There are substances that look crystalline that do this. One of those would be that metamaterials that you were interested in outside our meeting. I will point out that in one meteorite there's been a discovery of an alloy of aluminum and I think it's titanium that has this sort of structure. So we find things in the lab and then we find them out in the environment. This was formed in the ones I'm talking about were formed in space long ago. So I wanted to also mention that this idea of the toxicity of materials is something that it's actually something I've really started getting into recently. One of my interests is chemistry of materials, but also I'm very interested in how to teach that subject to students. And so I like to design experiments for college students, maybe high school students to play around with and learn about not only how to make these materials and the things they do, but also the things to be concerned about. So what I've put up on the screen here on the left are oh, OK, you can only see that. Hold on. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so on the left there are a series of vials. I mentioned the gold nanoparticles change color. Well, these are golds also very expensive, so we don't have students play around with it much. But silver is significantly less expensive. And so it's very easy actually to make silver nanoparticles of different sizes. And as you go from left to right in that picture, from the light yellow to the brown to the gray, you're going from nanosize silver up to just bulk, basically big chunks of, not big chunks, but flakes of silver floating around. Well, one of the things that silver, just any type of silver is known for is its antibacterial properties. And small particles of silver are even more effective against bacteria because they're small enough they can actually slip into the cell and then destroy the cell from the inside. And once you do that, of course, the cell is dead. So it's very effective. Well, I mean, that's great if you want to have a bandage or you want to coat your medical instruments with silver nanoparticles, which we do. To make medicine safer. And so that's great. But you also, the silver doesn't discriminate against what type of cell it attacks. It attacks pretty much every cell. And so one of the experiments that my students do is we take some very inexpensive plants that you can get in an aquarium. They make some silver nanoparticles, which are very easy to make. And then they plop down a little piece of this aquarium plant into a vial of the silver nanoparticles. And we take it out a week later. And then they extract the chlorophyll from it, the green pigment in the plants. And what we find is that the more nanoparticles you have in the solution and the smaller the nanoparticles are, the more toxic the solution is. And so from left to right, you can see there's a stalk of healthy plant, one that's been abused a little bit, and then the other on the far right is completely dead. And there was no chlorophyll to extract. And so yeah, these materials are fantastic. They do things that no other material can do. And they literally help mankind by helping us heal faster and be safer in a hospital. But they have a downside. And it's something that our students need to be aware of. And everybody needs to be aware of because we have to make decisions as a country, as a society, on how we want to use these and how we want to regulate them. But I'll also add the other interesting thing is this is not universal. This is not a universal problem. If we substitute gold nanoparticles, they don't affect the plant at all. So it's not, which makes it even more interesting from a scientific standpoint. Like, wow, why is one element nanoparticles really bad? Another element's nanoparticles not. So yeah, and there's still a lot we don't know about these materials. Yeah, it strikes me that talk about interdisciplinary, perhaps one way to deliver silver to a diseased cell in a targeted fashion. You might be able to link it to some kind of a monoclonal antibody directed to those cells. And then perhaps some have a chemical mechanism that could release the silver once it's found its target. Of course, there might be an issue with once you've killed the cell, how do you then clear it from the body so that the silver doesn't remain in the body in a toxic way or something. But one step at a time. Yeah, right. I kind of want to try something a little bit, maybe a little bit nutty here. I kind of want to do a lightning round because I do want to make sure with our time that we touch on some of the maybe sexier new materials that have made it into the popular science press that people might be interested in. I kind of want to just go through and throw out some materials and have the two of you just kind of remark on them if you don't mind. And the first one I want to mention is aerogel. So this is a crazy new material that seems to be getting a lot of interest. It's sometimes referred to as frozen smoke made up of super critical liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It's 99% empty space, semi-transparent, et cetera. So what do you guys think of aerogel? I love aerogels. I've actually known about them for close to 25 years now. Here's a YouTube video from a guy named Niall Red, and he makes his own aerogel. Oh, fantastic. So how you make them is really cool. You can make a jello version of glass. You can take that chemical as some sort of ortho-silicate, whatever. It doesn't matter what the chemical is called. But you can take a source of silicon and a acid and combine them in such a way that the silicon starts to polymerize. It forms SiO, SiO links in three dimensions. And literally, it becomes like jello. There's a lot of solvent in the network trapped in between the SiO links. So that's a problem. That's where all the mass comes. And all that solvent is supporting the jello. So you've got to take your jello chunk, which can be any shape that depends on the container you use. And you put it into a pressure container and fill it with a supercritical fluid. And a supercritical fluid is one that you've got a solvent of some sort. It could even be carbon dioxide. And you've got it under pressure and temperature high enough so that the distinction between gas phase and liquid phase is physically lost. And then you slowly, slowly, slowly vent the carbon dioxide. So there's never any transition experienced by the material between the liquid and solid. So essentially, it's a way of washing out all the stuff caught in the gel. Yeah. So that's where the drying comes in. It's drying. I never really had that had not really clicked with me. Right, right, right. Yeah. So again, getting all that stuff out is the main problem. And if you do it right, you're left with a shape that is like the size and shape of your original mold, but has all of the mass pretty much gone. It's just got the network left. It's mostly empty space. And a thin plate of this stuff, you could hold in one hand and you can hold a blowtorch in the other hand and fire it at a half inch plate of this stuff. And your first hand holding it doesn't feel any heat. Yeah, it's a super insulator. Yeah, fantastic. Yes. It would be lovely if there were better ways of making this stuff. I have a colleague who has spent about 20 years trying to make this stuff with a student perhaps and trying to get easier ways of making it. And it's a real challenge. The next material I want to mention is metamaterials. And these made it into the popular press because they can sort of create invisibility cloaks and have unusual optical properties. Let me see. Are you all familiar in any thoughts about? I'm not quite sure how these things work, but they appear to have optical properties that can bend light around them to make objects behind them disappear. Have you seen anything like this? I think the same principle that makes butterflies wings, all those different colors, without pigments. It's all refraction. I think the same principle holds that essentially if you make a nanostructure that can bend light in the right way, you can bend light around an object so you don't see it anymore. The ones I've seen are only good for certain wavelengths. And some of them are good for microwaves. Yes, that's exactly right. That's what that's consistent with what I'm looking at here. So you could have radar-resistant stuff, but still see the plane. Stealth bombers, I guess, and things like that. Though our president believes the bombers are, in fact, actually invisible. Yeah, it strikes the surface. And then instead of ricocheting off like most light will do on materials, it will kind of, from my understanding, sort of skim along the surface. And I think that's one reason why when you see a picture of a stealth bomber, it's got all these smooth edges. And it's kind of curved. And the idea is that only these smooth curved surfaces, the radar sort of just skims along the surface and goes around the material instead of bouncing off and going back to the radar detector. But yeah, these are pretty unusual materials. And yeah, I don't know a whole lot about them. Yeah, I think they're pretty new, actually. OK, next one is amorphous metals, which are metals with a disordered atomic structure. They can be up to twice the strength of steel. And they can disperse impact energy very effectively. I think amorphous metals are already being used in some commercial and applications. In fact, I once worked on a project for just a regular men's razor that was going to be made of amorphous metals for some reason. I think the inventor just thought they were cool. But any thoughts about amorphous metals? Have you seen any buzz about those? So the quasi crystals I put up are essentially an example of the amorphous metals. Right. So let me see if I can put that back up again. One of the features about amorphous metals is that if you think of the largest atoms in there, all packing as close as they can together, there's going to be a lot of space between atoms, right? Because spheres can only pack so close together. So what if you have a material that's got several different kinds of atoms? So that the smaller atoms can fit within the gaps between the bigger atoms. Maybe you have even some tinier atoms in there that can fit in between those gaps left behind. Those alloys, essentially, will be much denser. And atoms can knock around together a little more efficiently. I've seen the thing where you have a steel ball bearing in one of these amorphous metal ball bearings. And they look identical until you drop them. The steel bounces. The amorphous metal just goes plop, as if it's a sandbag. Yeah, so it basically disperses the energy and doesn't reflect it back in any organized way. It probably just turns it into heat or something. Imagine taking a bullet with that. So do the smaller atoms that are kind of bouncing around between the larger atoms in there, are those what absorb the extra energy? So the material doesn't bounce back? Yeah, I think what happens is that they help disperse the energy. Rather than having it go through a close packed crystal lattice, the successive waves, I guess, of energy that absorb, get refracted and deflected more. Just turns into heat more. Well, one thing I also want to make sure we touch on before our time is up is battery technology. I feel like batteries are going to be critical to a successful transition to a post-carbon world. The problem, it seems to me, is that our knowledge of how molecules transfer electrons is exquisite. And we understand that chemistry extremely well. The downside of that is that that makes it really, it seems to kind of limit the options we have for really developing better rechargeable batteries or way to store electricity in the post-carbon world. So I'm very curious to know what each of you think about what the prospects are for improvements in battery technology. Yeah, I think the batteries are becoming, obviously, more useful and more needed given the types of technology that we're developing, even cars that don't run on gasoline and things like that require some type of battery. And this gets back to why are we developing new materials at all? Because replacing gasoline with something that can store, I mean, gasoline stores energy. That's what a, all that energy is stored in the gasoline molecules. That's the beauty of fossil fuels is that all that energy is just packed in, and all we have to do is light it on fire. That's right. Well, so I mean, you can think about, we just need another material that doesn't emit CO2 when we use it that also stores energy just as well. And maybe even isn't flammable like gasoline or doesn't evaporate or isn't toxic to us. So that might even be better than gasoline. But these are the types of things that we need new materials for. And unfortunately, what we sometimes find is that the best materials that could replace gasoline or that can generate energy from the sun are themselves toxic. Like solar energy panels are difficult to recycle and there's a lot of waste in creating them. Ultimately, they're probably better than burning fossil fuels. But the materials that go into them can be difficult to process. Go ahead, Mike. Go ahead, please. So Sissi brings up some really good points in the chat about fuel cells. So for example, taking solar energy or wind energy or renewable energies, they're not always available on demand. So energy storage is a huge problem. And making lithium batteries or making batteries themselves isn't the 100% best way of storing the energy. And as has been pointed out, gasoline is such a energy-dense material that it's very hard to get away from. Energy storage by taking solar energy, for example, and using an electrochemical cell to make a fuel like methanol or methane or H2 is an active area of research. Because if you have methanol, for example, you can just store it in a drum until you need it. If you can make a electrochemical cell that makes the fuel from solar energy artificial for the synthesis essentially, and then can retrieve the methanol and burn it in another electrochemical cell, a fuel cell, a you're not using fire and running up against the thermodynamics of temperature differences to get the energy out. And B, you've got electricity on demand, and all you get out is the original CO2 and H2 or H2O that you put in. So yeah, there's a lot of research on taking things like CO2 and turning them into fuels and splitting water. We can make hydrogen really easily. Platinum is wonderful. Single-atom catalysts where we've basically got single atoms of platinum dispersed on the surface of other materials for H2 formation. That's an active area of research. What's really driving a lot of research today is the other part of the reaction, making oxygen. There's a lot of problems with making oxygen from water. That's the energy intensive part. I see. Vic mentions the development of solid state batteries. Can you guys talk a little bit about that? I thought lithium ion batteries were a solid state. Am I wrong about that? Or what's the difference between a solid state battery and a conventional battery? Yes. So a conventional battery, even one that's a solid state, just doesn't have a lot of liquid in it. All the materials would appear pretty dry to you if you took them out. But there is just enough in there to facilitate diffusion of lithium plus ions through the material so that charge can transport. There are other materials that are like solids as defined by having a single crystal structure through which ions can diffuse. And I think it's this small distinction that is being made in this case. If you have a solid, it's really hard for ions to diffuse through a solid. And it's the ions inside a battery that carry charge. Electrons don't move around inside a battery. It's all ionic. Is there a method for the direct flow of electrons independent of an ion? Yeah, well, that's what happens outside the battery. So the negative charges move through the wire outside the battery. Yes. And usually it's either atoms which have a negative charge or atoms which have a positive charge, which are moving around inside the battery to balance the charges. So it's only at the electrode surfaces where the electrons are generated. Within, away from the electrode surface, charges balance just by the movement of atoms. And that's what makes it slow, and that's what builds up resistance inside a battery. So that's why some of these solid state batteries are so thin so that you can have a lot of surface area for the electrodes to build up a lot of current and have very little resistance in between the electrodes. Tagline mentions that what we really need are high-capacity capacitors to store electricity as opposed to batteries that generate electricity. Are you guys aware of any research into just the sheer storage of materials for the sheer storage of electricity? Well, I think these solid state electrolytes that are the solid state batteries are very close to being a supercapacitor of that kind. There's really, again, just building up electrons and then stabilizing the electrons that are sitting on the electrode with positive charges on one, I guess, negative charges on the other. So you still have to have ions in between that move around. Well, that actually sounds very encouraging. Perhaps on that sort of upbeat note, we're just past the hour now. So maybe before we end, Kurt, do you have any final thoughts or comments you'd like to make before we wrap up? Well, I thought I might just mention, kind of looking towards the future, getting back to the idea of basic research as a foundation for new applied research. One of the things that I'm hopeful and very interested to see how it develops is the convergence of different disciplines, like nanotechnology and computing, biotechnology, and the cognitive science, neuroscience. We're approaching a point when ideas from one of these disciplines will be able to be applied to another discipline. And so this is where we get to things like computer brain interfaces, which would require you to understand how our brain works and how computer works and how to get the information to flow from a biological system to a computer system. We can't do that now, but in the near future, we will, just because we have done a lot of the basic research along the way. Yes, that's right. I think we are really approaching an era of real synergy in various disciplines in science that is going to be very exciting. So, and Mike, any questions, tell you more about the future. Think about old school materials, stone, ceramics, glass, bronze, and steel. We've lived with those for thousands and thousands of years. And in the past century or so, we've got a lot of information about how they really work. And these old school materials are going to be inspirations and useful themselves for the future. All right. I like that perspective of that point of view. Very good. All right. Well, Kurt and Mike, thank you very much for joining us, taking time out of your day to talk with us and with our students today. I think everyone really enjoyed it. So I want to, and I want to also thank the Science Circle and Chantal and Jess who organized this and Edith for promoting it and all of their hard work. And with that, I will gavel us to a close. Have a good weekend, you all. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Matt. Happy Halloween. Thank you so much, Kurt. Thank you. That was really enjoyable. Awesome.