Some materials exhibit a phenomenon known as “shape memory.” Shape memory is exactly what it sounds like: a material that has a native shape that it remembers even upon deformation. The neat thing is that you can “freeze” the material into a deformed shape, any shape you please, and then upon gentle heating the original shape is restored. You can cycle the material through many of these freeze/thaw cycles, each time choosing a different shape if you please, and so long as you have engineered the material correctly it will always go back to its original shape.
Shape memory was first seen in metal alloys such as nickel-titanium.
Metals are great, but the real cool shape memory materials are polymers, or plastics, since they can recover their original shape after much more aggressive deformation and can be programmed to undergo some truly gnarly shape changes. Here’s one group that did a little bit of P.R. in their movie:
How does it work? Shape memory polymers consist of two components. The first is a soft, deformable polymer. The second component is a polymer that crystallizes when the temperature is lowered appropriately. When you first cast the material, it the material forms “network points” on the nanoscale. When you increase the temperature, the network points break in a process analogous to melting. At this point, you can deform the material, in some cases over 200%, and – while holding it in its deformed shape – bring the temperature back down. The crystallizable component undergoes the opposite process as it did when you raised the temperature – that is, it “freezes” – and the material is locked into its deformed shape. When you increase the temperature above the “melting” temperature, the material begins to deform and naturally works to re-form its original network points, thereby recovering its original shape.
With some clever engineering, you can embed multiple programmed shapes into the material.
You can imagine a number of pretty cool applications for shape memory polymers. One of the first was for “smart sutures,” which are basically knots that tie themselves when actuated by a little bit of heat. If the actuation temperature is somewhere between room temperature and body temperature, you can imagine a surgeon placing a loose suture into the body and letting it tie itself. At the bottom of this page there are a few quicktime movies. The second one is a self-tying suture. Other groups have made devices that you can roll into a tube, insert into an blood vessel, and have it unfold itself into a stent in order to support weakened blood vessels. Groups are currently working to create shape memory polymers that respond to stimuli other than heat (like light or moisture, for example), create smaller devices, and decrease (or control) the reaction time.
Any baseball applications you can think of?
I have stupid questions, you have smart answers:
What happens if part of the plastic is broken while in the deformity phase? Will it partially reconstitute (“working around” or disregarding the broken bit), or does the break muck up the whole process? For example, in the second video, if you tore a big chunk out of the flat portion, would the coat hanger hooks still form properly?
What exactly do you mean by “cast the material”? I guess this is a way of telling a hunk of plastic, “this is your shape”. But how does that work?
With respect to the network points: OK, you have a shape with network points, which reconnect at the end of this deform/reform process. Can you create a new set of “original network points” for the same hunk of plastic? Can you say “your true shape was a coat hanger, but now your true shape is a popcorn bowl”? (if I was a scientist, I would definitely talk to the polymers) Do you just have to melt it down (or whatever), re-“cast” it, and voila, new shape, new network points?
Also: can you deform/reform, deform/reform an unlimited number of times (i.e. tie/untie the suture), or will the process eventually break down?
A lot of these answers are going to be educated guesses, since I’m far from an expert…
1. In areas that have been traumatized by the break, the whole process is going to get mucked up. But far from the break, the network points, and therefore the programmed memory, will be undisturbed and will behave normally. The question is how far is far. That distance is probably governed by the length of the polymer chains (a polymer is a chain of carbon atoms, not unlike molecular spaghetti) as well as the density of network points. My guess is that from any given break, you would have to travel several hundred nanometers, maybe up to a micron (about a fiftieth of the thickness of a human hair).
2. Casting the material can be as simple as blending a few precursor materials together into a mold and curing it (with heat or UV light, for example).
3. Not sure about this one. Many shape memory polymers are copolymers, meaning that they contain two distinct chemical identities in the molecular spaghetti. (Think of it this way: a homopolymer is a chain of consisting of repeat units of A, so its structure is AAAAAAAAA… A copolymer has some B in it as well, so you have AAABABABBAAAB…) In those cases, I would guess that you cannot reprogram its true shape from coat hanger to popcorn bowl.
In other cases, the shape memory polymers are actually physical blends, meaning that you mixed AAAAAAAAAAA… with BBBBBBBBBBBB… in a beaker. My intuition is that in those cases you can dissolve the polymer in an appropriate solvent and recast it. Again those are just guesses.
4. In a well-designed shape memory system, you should be able to do the deform/reform cycles hundreds of times without damaging your system.
4. Can you program it to deform to the same shape every time? In other words, can you go from Shape A (original) to Shape B (preferred deformity) to Shape A to Shape B ad infinitum, or is it Shape A to Shape X (where X is variable/uncontrollable)? You can probably only have one “saved structure” (set of reconstitutable network points) at a time, right? So the deformity just ends up however it ends up?
I am not sure. I *think* that it is currently only A–>X (where X is variable). But, I imagine that you could to A–>B if you engineered things correctly.
There are A–>B–>A systems for flat surfaces, so that you can make a water either spread or bead up on a surface based on whether you apply a voltage to the surface.
What if you tire before it’s done?
Then it’s called Saturday evening at the SeeLaBees’.
See? Now anyone who charges $35K/y+ for this is engaging in extortion.
Says the history major.
I don’t understand this recurring higher education extortion theme. I guess I’m not reading Free Kraut closely enough these days.
FK isn’t what you aren’t reading closely enough.
Ah. The “extortion” part is an overstatement, but there’s a lot of truth in this:
Not my experience. If a college doesn’t improve your value, they don’t get alumni contributions from you, which means a lot more than four years of tuition.
The “screening process” is what improves your value. Hey, I’m not complaining, I went to the best signifier in the country. (And, for the record, I learned a lot in both college in graduate school. But much of what I learned was not particularly useful for any practical purposes, and the parts that were I could probably have picked up just as quickly and considerably less expensively elsewhere, as iglew suggests.)
I’m still not convinced. I fully agree that parts of my education were not useful (I find few occasions to apply my research on 11 century popes or on simulating city traffic patterns), however I do think I emerged better at learning/thinking in general.
Could I have done that on my own? Maybe, but I wouldn’t have.
One of the things I realized in grad school was that I learned more from my peers than from my instructors. This is equally true for both “life lessons” as well as complex, specialized technical problems.
If your definition of higher learning is limited to watching online lectures and reading textbooks, UR DOIN IT RONG.
This. Although I do take mk’s point on our bias seriously.
I think there are probably better places to learn life lessons than grad school, no? (or if not better, different at least, and less expensive)
With respect to critical thinking cultivation (or whatever you want to call it), I would guess that people with nice degrees tend to inflate the utility of their time in school, while those of us without them probably over-disparage the process.
Depends upon the life lessons I suppose. In sal’s case, there probably isn’t a better place to have the collaborative-science life experience. I know I learned a lot of life lessons (defined, I assume, as non-book-learning) in college. Less so in Law School.
I think this is probably right. Maybe in part because I wouldn’t be where I am without mine, and you’d be no better (I assume, based on your comments) with one.
So those who get useful educations think it’s worth it and those who got useless educations didn’t? That seems to go without saying!
That does go without saying! Alas, it’s not what I said.
To re-phrase:
If you have a degree from a good university, you might be inclined to overestimate the value of those years to some extent (in the “it taught me how to think” sense, not in the career/income sense, where it’s worth is concrete, obvious, and quantifiable). Since I’m on a Pulp Fiction quote run this week: that’s pride fucking with you. If you do not have such a degree, you may be inclined to regard it as a bunch of snooty hooey that you could just as easily learn on your own (that would be envy and regret fucking with you).
ok, got it now. Thanks for the clarification.
I guess all that fancy book-learning didn’t help you with your reading comprehension.
Well, I didn’t *pay* to go to grad school.
What I was getting at was this: a lot of people think the “learning from your peers” aspect is all about life lessons and diversity of thought/experience.
In my experience, I found that I actually learned a lot about complex, specialized, technical issues from my peers. Moreso from them than my instructors, textbooks, independent review of relevant literature, etc.
That makes sense. I should have read your comment more carefully.
Maybe if you had finished college your reading comprehension would be better.
Same here. College improved my thinking a lot, and it’s not clear that that would have happened otherwise.
Thanks, I was wondering that myself.
It’s actually the best thread there’s been on ** in quite awhile (in totally unrelated news, the chief administrator has made about two comments in it)
Also, it’s what I was referencing in my “DFA should be an ** author” comment
Thought experiment:
Let’s say Person X (“James Smith”) posts on AN all the time. And in the course of those postings, James Smith makes all manner of disparaging comments about you and monkeyball in your capacities as quasi/de facto administrators of FK. James Smith nudges all his AN friends, saying “look at the knucklehead monkeyball, see this email he sent me, ha ha, what a dork, so clueless.” Fine so far, right? It is, after all, a time-honored blog tradition to mock other blogs, and as far as that goes, all of us here are in glass houses, that’s for sure.
But then, wouldn’t it be weird if James Smith also continued to comment regularly at FK? Wouldn’t you be disposed to regard James Smith as kind of a dick?
I don’t know, maybe it’s not weird or dickish. But I don’t think I would do it.
Wow. I can’t imagine ever devoting more than a line or two of snark to mocking Urban, but A for effort.
mikeA in the comments:
Yes, it’s something. It’s a lazy shortcut that results in the hiring of lots of incompetent people with high self-regard, and more importantly, the exclusion of many capable, hard working people who lack higher education bona-fides.
Setting aside professions where the baseline skill set is almost exclusively acquired via college (engineering, lawyering, and so forth), in the Generic Cubicle Workforce (that of Business Analysts, Project Managers, etc.), a degree on a resume tells you precisely nothing. With respect to “valuable information”, unless you are hiring someone straight out of school, if you are not looking at work experience first, second, third, … ninth, and tenth, you are making a mistake. Maybe the degree would be eleventh, in case of a tie.
I get the sense, as well, that many in that thread (and here) attended really good schools (Stanford, etc.) that probably do teach you a thing or three, and invariably spit graduates into higher-end professions (lawyer, etc.). I propose that this cultivates a skewed perspective. Most people go to shitty (but still relatively expensive) mid/lower-tier colleges, basically for the reasons enumerated by iglew, and, “incentive structures” or no, emerge with roughly the same capacity for analytical thinking and problem solving they went in with. This is because the classes suck, and are appallingly easy to pass. So when you see a business/communications degree from George Mason University or wherever on a resume, you can safely assume it is, for all intents and purposes, bullshit.
IME, identifying non-technical people who are bright, motivated and resourceful, and know how to cut through some bullshit and deal with the rest, is extraordinarily difficult. And I completely agree with you that in those fields, the college degree means nothing to me — I don’t even look at it.
For the technical fields, my argument (before I saw the “Setting aside…” clause) was going to be that getting a college degree is a measure of how motivated someone is to complete a (possibly contrived) goal despite a lot of bullshit — which can be a useful skill in many work environments.
Interestingly, the inverse skill (not being willing to put up with the bullshit) can be even more useful in other environments.
Agreed all around.
I might restate “not being willing to put up with the bullshit” as “the capacity to a) recognize bullshit as bullshit, and b) disentangle the important stuff from the bullshit, in order to focus on said important stuff, while simultaneously pretending that you regard the bullshit as important, so as not to alienate yourself from the majority of your co-workers (and probably your boss), who believe fervently in the bullshit and use phrases like ‘vertical integration’ unironically.”
Wow, nice. I guess that shows why I’m not one of those people! :-)
As a non-degree holding non-tech professional who’s achieved a fair level of success, that’s certainly how it played out for me. The life-proved achievements are way more dependable to employers than the sheepskin is. But for many businesses screening apps with degree = pass/fail is the easy way out regardless.
And amusingly, George Mason is actually the go-to safety school for kids from my high school, which I never once considered after dropping out of several much more formidable institutions.
I flunked out of GMU twice. Make of that what you will, in light of my comments above.
Good point, and guilty as charged re: bias.
And I do hear you on tuition getting out of step (one of my best HS friends is still pissed off by how much more BU tuition was than mine).
I guess my desire is to say that my experience was valuable so therefore college must be valuable, but I certainly couldn’t tell you that all colleges are like mine. I do think that focusing on the major is significant, however, since even at less well regarded schools you can still get a great education. It’s just that you don’t have to in order to graduate.
You went to Bullshit University?
No. He did. (and they’re exorbitantly expensive, which was fine since he was ROTC)
Certainly having/not having a degree or what kind of degree it is quickly recedes in relevance once people have job experience, but part of the point is to be able to get in the door in the door to some sort of semi-good job in the first place.
I agree –> “unless you are hiring someone straight out of school”
Depends upon whether they give you materials to do it yourself. Plus, if those kids didn’t go to MIT, how would they have branded their video?
How about a synthetic infield dirt (turf stadia already use synthetics for the warning track) that when wet transforms into a tarp that covers the entire infield? (I’m guessing that the entire substance needs to remain whole/intact, rather than aggregate like “dirt.”)
Like the concept, but your parenthetical guess is the likely bugaboo.
There’s also the fact that if the transformation is rapid/simultaneous enough, a sudden downpour could result in a decapitated infielder or 4.
I think I might sit and hope for rain for that. Can Crosby be one of the fielders?
Nanoturf on top of a controlled heating/cooling layer – turn the blades into little springs for funky hops when the A’s are batting.
Dammit. Home today with JP (little case of roseola), but antiquated history-major-salary Mac doesn’t like embedded Flash video.
That story about the wave sweeping the girl off the rocks at Acadia really shook me up. We were there almost exactly 24 hours earlier, and judging by the video, walking around the same area. Granted it was low tide the day before the hurricane, but still. My son was climbing rocks right there.
My life just changed.
Awesome.
I’m counting on these fancy new polymers to provide me with better plastic lawn furniture in the face of the ever-more-virulent assault from the sun.
Bobby Crosby’s dad is pretty pissed off.
*sigh*
I chuckled.
Father of the year
Has that ever been true?
If it is true, and they’re stashing him on the DL in order to avoid cutting Nomar, that’s … bizarre.
Should just cut both of ’em
Maybe Nomar is setting an awesome example for the youngsters or something. It could be that he sits in the dugout during games exuding such a potent mix of grit and wisdom that anyone who walks by magically gets dirt on their pant leg and starts talking sagely about what he needs to do to cover the outside corner. Pennington has probably already absorbed all sorts of insight about how to be a steely-eyed leader. By the time Kennedy, Ellis, and Nomar are through with him, he’ll be approaching Jeter levels of elite playthegametherightwayness.
Byrnes had his best year in Oakland.
Swisher had his best year in Oakland.
Scuatro is having a career year, in large part because he is walking more.
+ a fucking zillion.
Fixed.
I agree with Mr. Crosby. Give him a bus ticket or something and don’t call him anymore. Maybe we’ll see him playing SS in a corn field in Iowa…
“He is white and good looking, and should therefore be given several more chances.”
Awesome:
PleasesignwiththeSlegna PleasesignwiththeSlegna PleasesignwiththeSlegna PleasesignwiththeSlegna PleasesignwiththeSlegna PleasesignwiththeSlegna
Hey, guess what?
Ed Crosby sucked too!
Career OPS .547
Career OBP .282
Then again I’m too stupid to decipher the fielding stats, so maybe he was a stud on defense AS A UTILITY INFIELDER.
Did anyone check out McCoveyChronicles after last night’s debacle? They were on par with Lookout Landing-esque despair/hilarity. There was a random Darth Maul/Bothans/Justin Miller is a Bothan reference in there that made me laugh.
Awesome.
Although to be fair to GL, that’s basically every action movie. See, most egregiously, Enemy at the Gates (bad guy sniper never misses until he sees hero, then can’t hit anything at all ever)
Yep.
This. It’s smart, and a bit snarky. Needless to say I love it.
Bobby Crosby is absolutely evil. DFA-ing him would be absolutely good.
Because I feel compelled to link to the paintings of President Obama naked with Mark Ellis.
Maybe there’s a use for shape memory polymers in the field of contraception?
“smart” polymers, though not of the shape memory variety, are used in contraceptives (not sure if these are on the market yet or not): the contraceptive drug is embedded in a polymer matrix. At vaginal pH, the matrix tightly binds the drug. At higher pH, the polymer matrix swells and releases the contraceptive. Since semen has a higher pH than the vagina, the release of contraceptive drug is actuated at just the right moment.
This doesn’t have anything to do with polymers or contraceptives, but it’s in the ballpark, and it’s making me laugh, so close enough:
I listened to a mini-lecture yesterday that touched on Kinsey’s (often highly idiosyncratic) experiments. I guess in those days there was a theory making the rounds that the likelihood of a woman becoming pregnant was increased if the semen slammed into her cervix at a particularly high velocity.
Anyway, intrepid researcher that he was, Kinsey decided to measure ejaculation distance, and recorded hundreds of subjects doing just that. I can’t remember the average, but the record was eight feet.
Nice!
FBI puts bank robbery suspects face on billboards.
Isn’t that Jason Varitek?
It is, and what’s more, that’s John Henry getting robbed.