Better living through chemistry

Consider the following situation: you're preparing dinner, and handling hot peppers. You start doing something else, and, forgetting about the peppers, rub your eye(s).... What do you do?

Capsaicin, the source of the horrible, horrible burning pain, is a non-polar molecule. This means that it's not soluble in water, unless you add something like soap, which has both a polar group and non-polar groups, allowing it to interact with everybody. Because it's not soluble in water, flushing your eyes with water will mostly spread the capsaicin around, and as anyone who has accidentally gotten shampoo in their eyes can tell you, soap isn't that much less painful (though it does allow you to eventually flush it out with water). This is why milk is more effective for calming a burning mouth than waterSo what other options are there?

If you, or someone you live with happens to wear eye makeup with any sort of regularity, there is very likely makeup remover somewhere in your abode. It's explicitly formulated for removing oily things like mascara from the sensitive eye area without causing irritation. This is also why eye makeup remover is a remarkably effective capsaicin remover.

So next time this happens to you, reach for the makeup remover.* If you regularly handle peppers, even if you don't wear makeup, it's good stuff to have around.

*Mr. ME will totally vouch for this

MSE 101: Introductory References

FSP has an interesting post today about introductory textbooks.  While several such books exist for MSE, by far the most popular is Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction by Callister, or his other book, Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering. To me, these are a solid example of how to do an introductory textbook well. The focus is on presenting the breadth of MSE, with enough detail that almost all MSE majors I know kept their copy as a reference.

It deals with jargon by including a glossary at the end of each chapter, as well as actively defining terms. It is largely about the concepts, with just enough examples to make it seem relevant. While the actual text isn't particularly casual, the typesetting is a bit more free and open, and the illustrations look less like paper figures and more like really well done doodles.

In graduate school, many students in MSE Ph.D programs have a BS in a different discipline, typically physics. I consistently recommend and lend this book to students switching to MSE. However, it is ultimately a general, conceptual book, and falls short in presenting certain critical formulas (stress-based failure criterion, for example). But I have other books for getting into the details of particular areas. In fact, I have three different textbooks entitled "Mechanical Behavior of Materials".

Is there a textbook you would recommend for anyone starting in your field?

Paraphrasing Edison

My advisor asked me this morning to give him slides of new results for a presentation on the project I was told to put on the back burner for a while... by tomorrow morning.

I'm very tempted to send him a slide paraphrasing Edison: "Results? I have results! I know thousands of things that don't work."

And then include 10 slides of everything I've done that hasn't worked. But somehow, I don't think that's what he's looking for.

Doctor Who and MSE

The newest series of Doctor Who premiered on Saturday, with liberal application of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. One of the things I find fascinating is how different fans react to how the screwdriver has been used by the different incarnations of the Doctor. Matt Smith (the current Doctor) uses it largely as a non-destructive evaluation tool, or as, well, a screwdriver.  The Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, was a bit more reliant on his screwdriver.

In "The Empty Child" Chris Eccleston (the Ninth Doctor) uses it to repair a chain link fence, which one anonymous internet commentator was offended by.  But here's the thing: ultrasonic welding actually exists. It can be used on a variety of plastics, as well as metals, and unlike traditional welding, is very effective in joining dissimilar metals. It is often used for applications like microelectronics, where other forms of welding are simply too imprecise.

Fundamentally, ultrasonic welding works by creating a high-pressure wave creating local motion of the material. The mixing at the interface joins the two pieces. While current ultrasonic welding is limited to small thickness in metal, one can assume that given the massive power of the TARDIS, the Doctor can probably manage to weld some chain link fence back together. It's also one of the better processes to effectively join composite materials, without introducing defects, as typically happens with adhesives and definitely happens with mechanical fasteners.

So even though the concept of a time-traveling police box may be far-fetched, there is some science in science fiction.

Email Lists

It is astonishing how quickly my email drops off when the undergraduate are on break (currently, study break before finals). Engineering at GiantU has a general email list, plus I'm on my departmental list, the graduate students in my department list, and general university-wide sorts of emails. All of this results in a fairly large volume of email during the semester, much of which is completely irrelevant to me. And because there are often typos, it can be challenging to effectively filter out the crap.

To top it off, GiantU is having a major spam problem of late. In an average day, I probably get 30-50 emails. Of these, I care about 3-5... which means ~90% of the email I receive is irrelevant. However, during breaks, it's much closer to half.

What changes your email volume?

Busy yet Bored

It is somewhat amazing how you can be simultaneously overwhelmed with work, and yet bored for the majority of the day. Today, I'm watching code run, and due to licensing issues, I can only run one copy at a time. Despite having several projects, they've also all synched up into the same general phase, where every 45 minutes or so, I have to do something non-automateable, and then wait for another 45 minutes until it happens again.

Good day to catch up on reading papers, I suppose.

The Problem of Sub-Specialties

In commenting over at FCIWYPSC, I got to thinking about the issue of sub-disciplines. Materials science is already a small discipline, in terms of enrollment numbers. However, in terms of sub-disciplines, it's an enormous field. Here are some of the general areas researchers in materials science may work on:

Energy materials (oragnic or inorganic)
Computation (quantum through mesoscale)
Metallurgy (casting, welding, failure, alloying, forging...)
Ceramics
Amorphous Inorganic Solids (Glass, metallic glasses, sol-gels)
Polymers
Composites
Theory (thermodynamics and statistical mechanics)

Within each of these branches are many sub-specialties. The diversity in research is in some ways fantastic, but in other ways, it can become problematic.  Because students often learn both processing and characterization techniques, if advisor conflicts arise, changing groups means starting over. Skills are largely transferable, but results general are not. Leaving a group typically means leaving your results behind, because Sub-Discipline B doesn't care about Sub-Discipline A, and the relationship with Advisor A is probably such that you won't be publishing them (since you left A for a reason...).

On the other hand, if you decide you find fatigue tiring (no apologies for the pun), that diversity can be a good thing, allowing you to take your technical skills to something you find more interesting. As an undergraduate, I was able to be involved in a wider variety of research without leaving the comfort zone of my department right away.

How specialized is too specialized?