Latest Blog Posts for It's the Rheo Thing

• Curses! Environmental Stress Cracking
  on Sep 6, 2016
  We've had a lot of aphids attacking plants in our garden this year. My usual approach is to use an insecticidal soap that I make by diluting down from a concentrate. "Normal" soap is the sodium salt of a fatty acid, while an insecticidal soap is just...
• A cool new fabric
  on Sep 2, 2016 in polyethylene
  The tale of The Emperor's New Clothes is as much about marketing hype as it is about keeping up pretenses in a social setting. The hype over "smart clothing" is just that, but a new report (open access!) from Stanford researchers about a radiative-tr...
• You can't get there from here
  on Sep 1, 2016 in teaching
  Being on a new campus this fall means getting lost. Finding the right building is the easy part. Finding a staircase in the building is also fairly simple. But the real challenge is deciding if it is the correct staircase.The building that I my offic...
• Slide Rule Giggles
  on Aug 30, 2016
  I've always loved slide rules. As soon as I learned in 8th grade about logarithms and how they formed the basis for a slide rule, I was hooked. Just like 2 rulers can be used to do addition and subtraction, so can 2 rulers, logarithmically scaled, be...
• Theology, Rheology and some freaky strange search results
  on Aug 24, 2016 in rheology
  Dan Lowry (@DrFriction) tweeted last night "Whenever life seems devoid of meaning or humor, just do a web search on 'theological properties'" (referring to the fact that spellcheckers typically attempt to change "rheological" into "theological"). So...
• Polyiodide
  on Aug 23, 2016 in research
  The number of elements that are capable of forming a polymer just by themselves and without the assistance of other elements is very small. A large part of this is due to most of the periodic table being made of metals, elements that not capable of f...
• The plastics revolution: we already had it
  on Aug 19, 2016 in biopolymers PE
  A news feature article in this week's Nature entitled "The plastics revolution: how chemists are pushing polymers to new limits" is more of the same old, same old. And it doesn't help that it's from the same old researchers contributing to this nonse...
• Trash Talking Translational Research
  on Aug 18, 2016 in research
  A new editorial (open access and less than a page long) in ACS Chemical Neuroscience takes a few swings at all the emphasis being placed on translational research and proposes that more of it should go back into basic research, particularly in synthe...
• Is there a retraction ahead for the microplastics and fish larvae research?
  on Aug 16, 2016 in environment ocean plastic
  Retraction Watch is reporting that a recent article in Science regarding microplastic pollution is undergoing a thorough re-examination. The article claims (in part) that the particles reduce hatching rates and are preferably eaten by hatchlings over...
• Behold the lowly syllabus...
  on Aug 15, 2016 in education
  One of the unexpected surprises of starting a teaching career is the syllabus. I don't remember much detail about how they were when I was in school some 30+ years ago, although I know that they would have office hours, exam dates, how grades were de...

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