TV heads up: New materials ...

It was very good.

I thought thie was excellent. No padding, and the presenter was very unusual in that she talked normally, not patronising a little tot like the rest of them.

Has that been on before? Seems familiar. Brian

Maybe she has not been to media school yet. Brian

I thought that too. There was a series of progs which a chap a few years back looking at metals, ceramics, etc.

But no, this was new and to be fair, I wasn't really aware of any of the new materials that did sound quite ingenious. You had:

- new ceramics to replace metals in jet engines - much much lighter and able to deal with the heat.

- new ceramics for dental crowns that pack the grains so tight water can't ruin the integrity. Added bonus they can be 3D-printed (we saw that) into a perfect replica of a tooth

- MDF replacement sheeting material made from potato waste

- Breeze block replacement material made from growing mycelium in substrate of waste in a mould. The resultant block is lightweight and very insulative and fireproof.

- a replacement textile made from the (waste) fibres of a pineapple

- hollow fibre optic cables that improve transmission speeds by 30%

- a method of etching 2^8 bits onto a piece of glass such that it can store 300+TB on a wafer the size of a coin, and which should outlast the universe.

(I only watched it once while was also making some small models , so "multi tasking" isn't a modern kidz thing :) Hopefully I caught all the headlines.)

"Brian Gaff" wrote in news:prm9lb$5hq$1@dont- email.me:

Whereas the programme I saw about "Steel" was very annoying.

Looked good, BUT growing pineapples is rather destructive and wasteful in itself - rather like palm oil. So far as I've seen, hemp is very good for textile, all the other parts can be used and it need very little watering or pesticides. Can also be grown in the UK, so no imports.

Fascinating. It will be interesting to see how many of the items she reviewed eventually become commonplace. I was particularly impressed by the data storage in those glass disks, at the end.

But I was a little surprised not to see mention of the 'bricks made from sand and pee', mentioned by the beeb recently

Does anyone here understand the chemistry of that? Microbially induced calcite precipitation is in there somewhere, and can be achieved with urea, i.e. pee (or one of its main constituents)

You can forget that in the UK. Any attempt at farming hemp will be made uneconomic by the security required. If it was that easy, it would be done by now.

I am well aware there are hemp farmers in the UK. But their rarity tends to suggest there's a reason it's not more widespread.

Shame, really, as it's also an incredibly good way of fixing the soil.

But there are non-psychoactive varieties of hemp, i.e. those low in THC (tetrahydrocannbinol), which is the main psychoactive ingredient. Are you saying that if those who use cannabis for...er...recreational reasons get to hear of a field of hemp in the area, they'll be all over it like wasps to a jam pot, regardless of whether it's psychoactive, so a lot of strong fencing will be required? See

I believe it's happened where it's been tried.

It's all rather moot, as to grow any species of cannabis requires a Home Office license (thanks to the 1971 MDA) and part of the granting will involve security protocols that make the resultant hemp pretty expensive.

For myself I think hemp farming would be a great boon to UK sustainable farming. But it's far more important messages are sent about the War on Drugs, as it enters it's sixth decade with no signs of success whatsoever.

Mind you, I'd happily see wolves reintroduced too.

Good, but...

The presenter said *lack* of friction was desirable for railway tracks but with wheeled trains friction is essential for braking and traction.

More explanation of the superconducting magnet would be helpful, as the impression was given that it is just a material which becomes *very* magnetised just by cooling it - there must be coil windings that require a current to be established in them in the first place. Also, what stopped the little wagon from falling off the track of magnets at the corners?

Insufficient distinction was made between communication speed as in kilometres per second (i.e.the speed of light in different media) and speed as bandwidth in megabits per second. The latter is needed to watch a super high definition video but the former is only important where latency is critical as in gaming - and even so, changing the medium from glass to air is unlikely to be critical as most of the latency will be down to the equipment at either end. (Changing from glass to air would improve both measures of speed.)

The thing that makes "fashion" bad for the environment isn't what clothes are made from but "fashion" itself. People must be throwing away an awful lot of perfectly good clothes if the *average* expenditure is £1000 per person per year.

Dental implants don't cost the NHS as they are rarely funded.

I didn't realise that crowns were made from zirconia. Acrylic is good enough for dentures and I would have thought would last long enough.

Yes - the friction bit was poor.

I bet they are if you are an immigrant with poor teeth that are preventing you from getting a job!

regardless, it was light years better than the Horizon about SETI which made a 10 minute segment about how two of the scientists met and got married.

I can forgive the less-than-doctorate level detail on the basis that most of the materials presented were novel to me ...

IMBW but I don't think it's necessary to have a coil to induce the magnetism in the superconducting disc. The presence of the magnets in the track is sufficient to induce a current in the disc as soon as the disc moves (even slightly, like when she removed that spacer), which creates a magnetic field that repels the one in the track.

Dunno!

I think they call it 'Quantum Locking' search for videos of superconducting magnets on mobius tracks

When I worked in the prisons I met a man who had carried out a fraud of such complexity that no-one could understand it, and the judge had said in effect that the jury would have to convict him as an article of faith in the Serious Fraud Office.

Bill

Exactly. Stupid criminals get time. Smart criminals get knighthoods.