At extremely small scales, looks can be deceiving. While at first glance you might see lily pads floating on a tranquil pond, this image is actually a clever adaptation of a snapshot taken on a scanning electron microscope.
In reality, the green spots are only a few micrometers across—smaller than width of a human hair. They make up a surface coating that was developed to limit the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The coating is composed of a silver-based material applied to a glass surface. The lotus flower, though, was some added artistic flair courtesy of image-editing software.
Mohsen Hosseini, Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering, and William Ducker, professor of chemical engineering, recently won an award in the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) image contest with this image. Both Hosseini and Ducker are affiliated with the Macromolecules Innovation Institute (MII).
Without expecting to do more than answer a question posed by a YouTube video, Virginia Tech researchers may have changed how people think about the process of freezing.
Lead Virginia Tech researcher Jonathan Boreyko, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, and his student researchers were watching a YouTube video of a soap bubble freezing. The mesmerizing sight of ice crystals floating around the bubble made the engineers wonder what caused the phenomenon.
Boreyko and student researchers Farzad Ahmadi and Saurabh Nath, both graduate students in engineering mechanics, and Christian Kingett, an undergraduate researcher in engineering science and mechanics who graduated in 2019, conducted literature research and found that no one had ever studied how soap films or bubbles freeze.
The results of the team’s query, which began as a simple “why,” has been published in the journal Nature Communications, explaining the physics behind what causes the ice crystals jump up into the bubble and swirl around, thus changing perceptions about the process of freezing.
#NSF-funded Engineer Chris Williams heads the effort at Virginia Tech to further advance 3-D printing–known among engineers as additive manufacturing–with copper, a widely used conductor in electronics.
Copper is electrically and thermally conductive, and is found in products across all industries, from our personal electronic devices and computers to satellites and nuclear reactors. As such, there are numerous applications for printed copper, including structural heat exchangers, three-dimensional antennas, and components for rocket engines. If successful, the results gleaned from this project can also be used to educate future engineers in designing systems with 3-D printing.
The Week 5 results produced little movement in the Amway Coaches Poll as the top teams for the most part held serve.
Alabama easily retains the No. 1 ranking after a 66-3 demolition of Mississippi. The Crimson Tide, who have outscored their first two SEC opponents by a combined margin of 125-3, received 59 of 65 first-place votes.
Clemson, a road winner at then-No. 12 Virginia Tech, stays put at No. 2 with the remaining six first-place nods. No. 3 Oklahoma, which had the weekend off, and fourth-ranked Penn State, an easy winner against Indiana, also maintain their positions. Washington, now the highest ranked Pac-12 member, climbs a notch into the top five.
In light of recent events (aka the horrible incident that happened in Colorado around midnight last night) I have decided it is indeed time to talk about life, this journey, and what it means.
To be quite honest with you, I think everyone is fully aware that life is short, but a lot of people take that for granted. Far too many people also take life way too seriously. As annoying and overused the phrase “YOLO” is, it is extremely true. As far as we know, you do only live once, so make it worthwhile. Life is too short for regrets, so even if you do regret something, put it behind you and move on. Stop thinking about and living in the past. Live in the present. Live in the present, because this is where you are now, this is the youngest you will ever be again, and frankly, if you don’t you will probably wind up regretting these moments too. I have made a lot of decisions in the past where I am not like “well shit I should have never done [or said] that” but then I put it behind me. Screw regret. It’s just our mind’s way of haunting us.
I was talking to one of my friends today about work, telling him how busy I have been all week working overtime to get everything done that needed to be done. He’s usually not serious - always the one making jokes and the one we go to for a laugh, not advice - but he said something serious and seriously true - “you have the rest of your life to be an adult. You’re in your prime, have fun and do what you want”. That’s something we tend to forget. We’re so busy with school and/or work that we forget to be a kid sometimes. We forget that this is our time - with no kids, no bills to pay, no worries other than school and work - to have fun. This is our time to be adventurous, to stay up all night and have a movie marathon just because we can, to make our dreams a reality.
That’s what this whole bucket list thing is about. It’s about taking things that seem impossible and so far out of our reach, and make them possible. To make our wildest dreams come true. If you would have told me when I started high school that by the time I finished my first year of college I’d have started rowing, driven a four-wheeler, and most importantly, found friends who I can be my complete self around and not care what anyone thinks, then I would have told you you’re effing insane and should probably check yourself into a mental institution. Five years ago I worried about so much - what people thought of me, how my hair looked (god forbid I went au natural), what I got on every single test and quiz, how I acted. I thought I had to be perfect. I think part of it is how I was raised. I love my parents, but there came a point where I just stopped listening to them. I didn’t rebel, but I realized that my parents are the parents that push me to do more and strive for more - nothing is ever good enough. I realized that I could never make them (or anyone) happy if I didn’t first make myself happy. The more I focused on my own personal happiness, the more happy my parents became as well (shocker, shocker right? haha).
This whole incident at the movie theater in Colorado is a horrible reminder of how short life is. We never know when God will decide it is our time to go - whether it will be tragically or naturally. He has a plan for each of us (sorry I’m not sorry for the God-talk you non-believers out there, but this is my blog, I’ll say what I want ;] ) and no one, not even doctors, know what that is. It’s like the infamous case of a doctor telling a patient they have x amount of time to live, and then they wind up living longer. No human knows, only God does. I’m not in any way saying God’s plan for James Holmes was for him to be personally responsible for the largest shooting in U.S. history, killing a dozen people and injuring dozens more, but I am saying people are taken from us all too soon sometimes, because loss teaches us a painful reminder - one that we need. No one goes to a movie theater thinking “Hm, maybe there will be a mass shooting tonight.” There was a 6-year-old, 4-year-old, and 4 month-old baby in that audience. If my parents had taken me to a midnight premier of a movie when I was 6 and I got to wear a costume to boot, I’d have told every kid I knew and every kid I saw. I would never think of something like that could ever happen. As if kids weren’t scared enough of the world, add witnessing a mass murder. I can almost guarantee those kids, along with many other witnesses are going to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The world? Yeah it’s kind of a mess. But of course it is. I researched this guy and it sounds like he didn’t really have many friends, and when he got to Colorado to get his PhD it sounds like he didn’t have any. He went on a downward spiral. He had no friends there, his grades dropped, he started to withdrawal from school, and he started to buy guns. Humans need friends - psychology will tell you that. It’s kind of hard to believe, but in all honesty if he had some friends in Colorado, there’s a chance this tragedy would not have happened. The same goes for the Virginia Tech shooter. There is a recurring trend here, which really gets me thinking about friendship. Everyone deserves a friend. Even just 1 good friend. My friends keep my feet on the ground, and the same could have rung true for those 2 men. But instead, these days (along with many others) will go down in infamy.
“Life is too short to stress yourself with people who don’t even deserve to be an issue in your life.” -Anonymous
Kendall Fuller had an up and down season as a rookie last year but he had enough ups to show that he could become a great cornerback in the NFL. So far this season that’s exactly what he is continuing to prove to everyone. Kendall Fuller was supposed to be a first round draft pick in the 2016 NFL Draft but dropped to the third round because he suffered a season-ending injury his last year at…
This weekend I was in Southwest Virginia in a town called Blacksburg, Virginia where I spent four wonderful years going to college at Virginia Tech before graduating in 2015. I have family who currently lives in Blacksburg, family who grew up in Blacksburg and family who also previously attended and some who currently attend Virginia Tech.
There was a mass shooting at a high school in Tennessee this afternoon. Fuck America.
Just this morning I saw the upcoming anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting on my calendar and thought something like “oh! another silver lining of COVID, no RL school = no school shootings”
For years, scientists and engineers have synthesized materials at the nanoscale level to take advantage of their mechanical, optical, and energy properties, but efforts to scale these materials to larger sizes have resulted in diminished performance and structural integrity.
Now, researchers led by Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech have published a study in the journal Nature Materials that describes a new process to create lightweight, strong and super elastic 3-D printed metallic nanostructured materials with unprecedented scalability, a full seven orders of magnitude control of arbitrary 3-D architectures.
Strikingly, these multiscale metallic materials have displayed super elasticity because of their designed hierarchical 3-D architectural arrangement and nanoscale hollow tubes, resulting in more than a 400 percent increase of tensile elasticity over conventional lightweight metals and ceramic foams.
