Coating liquid metal droplets in a nanoparticle mix creates an extra strong non-stick conductive material that retains its shape even under high impact, Australian research has found.

The breakthrough paves the way for new developments in soft electronics, said lead author of the research, Dr Vijay Sivan from RMIT’s Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“It’s a bit premature at this stage but in future we can see it may have a lot of applications,” he said, including extendable antennas, and stretchable and reconfigurable wires.

The research team’s paper, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, described how droplets of galinstan liquid metal were coated with powdered insulators including Teflon and silica and semiconductors such as titanium dioxide tungsten trioxide, as well as conducting carbon nanotubes.

Once given their nanoparticle coating, the liquid metal marbles “can be split and merged, can be suspended on water, and are even stable when moving under the force of gravity and impacting a flat solid surface,” with semiconducting properties at their surface, the researchers said in their paper.

“This new element thus represents a significant platform for the advancement of research into soft electronics,” the paper said.

A before-and-after video created by the researchers shows how, without the coating, the liquid metal marbles lose shape and stick when dropped onto a hard surface. The coated liquid droplets, however, retain their shape and bounce like a soft ball.

Associate Professor Patrick Kluth from the Australian National University’s Department of Electronic Materials Engineering, said the researchers had produced an interesting finding.

“The applications and limitations for practical use for systems like this can be: reproducibility of the fabrication process, scalability and cost of the fabrication (can they be manufactured in sufficient quantities at reasonable cost), and long term stability under application conditions (how long do they last in applications). Such factors will certainly determine the industrial success of an innovation such as this,” said Dr Kluth, who was not involved in the RMIT research.

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The way tungsten is sharpened can mean the difference between a sound and poor tungsten inert gas (TIG) weld. Unlike aluminum, tungsten for stainless steel requires a sharp point with a long taper to direct the arc from the TIG welder to the surface of the stainless steel. Using a tungsten sharpener places the correct taper and tip on a tungsten electrode without the off center grind associated with using a bench grinder.

Instructions

        1
        Set a tungsten grinder on a level surface. Turn on the grinder. Allow it to reach the recommended grinding speed.

        2
        Turn the size dial -- located on the front of the grinder -- to the size of the tungsten electrode you need to sharpen.

        3
        Slide one end of the tungsten electrode into the hole located on the size dial. Push the tungsten toward the grinder until the tungsten begins to spin. Release the tungsten. Allow it to spin in the grinder for one minute.

        4
        Turn off the grinder. Remove the tungsten electrode from the size dial. Inspect the point at the end of the electrode. Turn on the grinder and reinsert the tungsten if the end of the electrode does not form a sharp point.

        5
        Repeat the process to sharpen the other end of the tungsten electrode.

Tips & Warnings

    Protect your eyes by wearing safety glasses when using a tungsten grinder to sharpen a tungsten electrode.

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It’s a famous bet in the ongoing battle to try and get environmentalists to understand economics. The bet between Julian Simon, the economist, and Paul Ehrlich, the environmentalist. Ehrlich insisted that commodities would become more expensive: they were running out in the face of the population explosion. Simon asserted the opposite: more people meant more brains meant better methods of extraction and lower usage per unit of production. Thus prices should fall.

Simon won: but that’s not quite the end of the matter. With different commodities, or over different timescales with the same ones, Ehrlich could have. Which is something that Mark Perry notes here:

    “It will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year, and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was happy to bet on any period from a year on up, then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s. He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.”

For the underlying argument though this is the important point:

    I’m not so sure that Simon was just lucky. If Simon’s position was that natural resources and commodities become generally more abundant over long periods time, reflected in falling real prices, I think he was more right than lucky, as the graph above demonstrates.  Stated differently, if Simon was really betting that inflation-adjusted prices of a basket of commodity prices have a significantly negative trend over long periods of time, and Ehrlich was betting that the slope of that line was significantly positive, I think Simon wins the bet.

For Professor Perry shows us the all commodities index over the near century that we have data. And it is indeed declining. Sure, there are periods where the alarmists would win, but the general move over time favours the cornucopians.

My interest here though is to explain exactly why it was that Simon won in the 80s, the period of the original bet. And also why Erhlich would have won in the late 90s and 00s. But why he would still lose over substantial time periods (and no, I’m not willing to make a bet on this).

The original bet was on the following commodities: nickel, copper, chromium, tin and tungsten.

And there were a couple of standout points in that decade of the 80s. Tin, for example, slumped in price. But it wasn’t for any environmental nor even technological reason. It was because the world cartel backing the price went bankrupt. This was the International Tin Council. An organisation set up post-WWII to ensure a “fair” tin price. As anyone at all who has read the works of the late James Buchanan will immediately understand, the people who were really interested in this were the producers. Public choice theory does tell us that consumers won’t worry all that much about the price of only one material, for they use many and the price of just the one isn’t all that important. Producers will worry a great deal about the price of their only product. Thus governmentally determined “fair” prices will end up being high prices.

This is indeed what happened and to keep them high the ITC bought in and stored excess production. By 1985 they didn’t have any more money, they went bust and the price collapsed.

This was hugely beneficial to Simon’s side of the bet but wasn’t really the point he was arguing on. That is much better represented by what happened to copper. The full story is here.

The story is SX-EW (solvent extraction and electro-winning). This is what Simon was talking about: that technology would advance and new stocks of materials would be exploitable. This would happen faster than demand would leading to falls in prices. SX-EW opened up the entire planet to another wave of copper exploration. Roughly, before 1980, we made copper from copper sulfides. If we found a mountain of copper oxide then that’s what it stayed at, copper oxide. Copper oxide wasn’t copper ore, it was simply dirt, for we didn’t know how to extract the copper from it.

SX-EW changed that: it’s a process to extract copper from copper oxide. Thus all those mountains of copper oxide out there (and there are many, quite literally, mountains of copper oxide) became copper ore instead of dirt. Thus the price declined.

Moving on into the 90s the great event in the non-ferrous and minor metals world (all of these metals are in one of those two groups) was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Firstly, the economy collapsed meaning that there were no consumers there for the metals that were being produced. Thus they flooded onto the world markets, depressing prices. But more than that, there was also the series of stockpiles. One estimate is of $700 billion’s worth. These also flooded out onto world markets.

Take, as an example, tungsten. Today’s price is around the $50 a kg level. The price in the 80s was, inflation adjusted, not far off that. But in the 90s it fell to $7 a kg. Just so much was flooding out of the CIS (the ex-Soviet Union by this point) that that price had collapsed.  I played my tiny part in this, purchasing a few container loads here and there. And much the same happened to nickel, aluminium and chromium.

This explains why taking the prices from the mid 90s onwards would favour the Ehrlich side of the bet. Nothing at all to do with increasing scarcity in the grand sense, just a recovery of prices from their post-Soviet low. Once that $700 billion stockpile had been sold prices would obviously recover.

Just to give you an example of what this meant, I’m currently working in the Ore Mountains. On the Czech/German border. There are a number of tin/tungsten mines here, all closed by 1992 at the latest as as result of that ex-Soviet flood. They’re all reopening in the next few years as prices are back to around their long term levels. It was the 90s that was the exception: some of these mines have been going since the 14th century.

One more little story about nickel. There was great excitement in the 90s as an Australian company announced that it had a new process, capable of extracting nickel from a new type of ore. An ore of which there was bountiful amounts lying around in Australian deserts. The whole system would make them the lowest cost producers in the world.

This, not unnaturally, made everyone else hesitant to invest in new nickel projects. So no new ones were started. Then it turned out this new technology was a bit more complex than first thought and the company went bust. Which led to a vast spike in the nickel price. At which point people scrambled to get nickel projects going again, the new owners of the bust plant got it sorted out and prices came back down again. They’ve more than halved since the peak.

The end result of all of this is that yes, it is true that Ehrlich could have, would have, won the bet depending upon the starting date. But note that it would have been either political actions, or teething problems with new technology, that would have allowed that. None of these metals faces an actual shortage as yet. Further, note that over variable time scales Simon is still correct: it really is true that new technologies of extraction are developed and these increase supply and push prices down.

Which leaves me trying to point out that Simon really was correct: it’s just the timescale that can be a bit dodgy. We do discover new mineral resources, we do develop new extraction technologies, which make larger amounts of mineral resources available to us. There are other events that happen, certainly, which push prices up for periods of time. But the long term trend for metals at least is downwards.

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Tungsten rings and stainless steel rings are both cost-effective alternatives to the more expensive gold and platinum selections. However, there are differences between them to keep in mind depending on your needs and budget.

    Durability
        Tungsten and stainless steel rings both resist fading, rust and corrosion. Neither metal will stain the body. Tungsten is a much heavier metal than stainless steel, and is therefore stronger and harder to scratch. However, stainless steel is durable enough to hold up to daily wear with proper care.

    Style and Finish
        Both types of rings can be given a variety of styles and finishes. Due to its superior strength, a tungsten ring's polish and finish will outlast that of a stainless steel ring.

    Sizing Options
        Neither type of ring can be resized. Tungsten rings are readily available in most sizes, even in hard-to-find half sizes. It can be more difficult to find the right size in the desired style of stainless steel ring.

    Financial Considerations
        Costs for both types of rings can vary widely, but stainless steel is less expensive. A 2010 search on Amazon.com found an 8mm flat band tungsten ring for $29.95 and a comparable sterling silver ring for $5.22. At the national jewelry retailer Zales, a sterling ring went for $119, and a comparable tungsten ring was just under $280.

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