1 00:00:16,466 --> 00:00:20,804 And so I'll show you just a couple in my why this matters. 2 00:00:20,804 --> 00:00:23,473 Because glass is, after all, made of-- there 3 00:00:23,473 --> 00:00:25,141 it is up there in case you can't see it. 4 00:00:25,141 --> 00:00:29,746 This is the abundance of elements versus atomic number, 5 00:00:29,746 --> 00:00:32,048 and you notice the very top two elements 6 00:00:32,048 --> 00:00:37,787 are silicon and oxygen. And so it would be really nice if we 7 00:00:37,787 --> 00:00:39,923 could make a lot of stuff out of these really 8 00:00:39,923 --> 00:00:41,291 abundant cheap elements. 9 00:00:41,291 --> 00:00:43,693 Think sand. 10 00:00:43,693 --> 00:00:47,697 Could I take sand and make a lot of stuff out of it? 11 00:00:47,697 --> 00:00:49,499 Well, not if I can't control. 12 00:00:49,499 --> 00:00:54,304 Not if I have to heat it up to 3,000 degrees or its viscosity 13 00:00:54,304 --> 00:00:56,873 isn't what I want or it doesn't give me the properties I want, 14 00:00:56,873 --> 00:00:58,842 but that has changed. 15 00:00:58,842 --> 00:01:01,378 That has fundamentally changed. 16 00:01:01,378 --> 00:01:03,513 So we can now look at materials like this, 17 00:01:03,513 --> 00:01:05,749 these super-abundant materials, and we can completely 18 00:01:05,749 --> 00:01:06,349 rethink them. 19 00:01:06,349 --> 00:01:07,951 And I'll give you one example. 20 00:01:07,951 --> 00:01:09,419 It's already a few years old, but I 21 00:01:09,419 --> 00:01:12,589 think it's just a really cool idea, which 22 00:01:12,589 --> 00:01:14,391 is called the Solar Sinter. 23 00:01:14,391 --> 00:01:17,327 And here he's developed this machine 24 00:01:17,327 --> 00:01:19,362 that is entirely solar powered. 25 00:01:19,362 --> 00:01:21,431 They're solar cells for the electricity. 26 00:01:21,431 --> 00:01:26,136 And it's a focused beam of light from the sun that 27 00:01:26,136 --> 00:01:29,039 gets hot enough to engineer the glass. 28 00:01:29,039 --> 00:01:32,042 So he takes sand from the desert that he's in. 29 00:01:32,042 --> 00:01:34,944 He puts it in a container, and he's got a 3D printer 30 00:01:34,944 --> 00:01:36,112 that he's made. 31 00:01:36,112 --> 00:01:38,014 It's entirely solar powered. 32 00:01:38,014 --> 00:01:42,185 There's no fossil fuels, but he can take sand and turn it 33 00:01:42,185 --> 00:01:45,088 into something structural. 34 00:01:45,088 --> 00:01:47,690 And so there's a vase that he's made, 35 00:01:47,690 --> 00:01:49,192 and you can take that out. 36 00:01:49,192 --> 00:01:50,894 And again, that's just the beginning 37 00:01:50,894 --> 00:01:53,530 of rethinking what we could do with these super-abundant 38 00:01:53,530 --> 00:01:54,364 materials. 39 00:01:54,364 --> 00:01:58,935 Here's an example from also a few years ago from an MIT lab. 40 00:01:58,935 --> 00:02:02,205 This is Neri Oxman's lab, and she's in the Mediated Matter 41 00:02:02,205 --> 00:02:06,743 lab here at MIT, and she's developed a 3D printer. 42 00:02:06,743 --> 00:02:07,410 [VIDEO PLAYBACK] 43 00:02:07,410 --> 00:02:09,211 [MUSIC PLAYBACK] 44 00:02:09,211 --> 00:02:14,217 And so there it is printing something with glass. 45 00:02:14,217 --> 00:02:17,887 And she can print lots of different designs now using 46 00:02:17,887 --> 00:02:18,588 glass. 47 00:02:18,588 --> 00:02:20,924 She has a cool video. 48 00:02:20,924 --> 00:02:22,659 And there is the printhead. 49 00:02:30,100 --> 00:03:05,201 And again, 1,900 Fahrenheit. 50 00:03:05,201 --> 00:03:08,138 I'm not sure that I want a 1,900 Fahrenheit 51 00:03:08,138 --> 00:03:11,241 printer on my desktop. 52 00:03:11,241 --> 00:03:14,777 But as you can imagine, what they had to do-- 53 00:03:14,777 --> 00:03:17,113 I'll just give you one more example and then we'll stop. 54 00:03:17,113 --> 00:03:18,948 What they had to do is understand everything 55 00:03:18,948 --> 00:03:19,949 we've just talked about. 56 00:03:19,949 --> 00:03:22,485 How do you engineer the viscosity, the melting point 57 00:03:22,485 --> 00:03:24,754 to make it all work in a 3D printer? 58 00:03:24,754 --> 00:03:26,389 The last point I'll give you is this. 59 00:03:26,389 --> 00:03:27,056 I love this. 60 00:03:27,056 --> 00:03:28,391 This is from a few years ago. 61 00:03:28,391 --> 00:03:31,294 It's a group in Japan that made a glass that 62 00:03:31,294 --> 00:03:34,631 is as strong as steel. 63 00:03:34,631 --> 00:03:36,599 And what they talk about-- this is what I like. 64 00:03:36,599 --> 00:03:39,168 They say just think of a world where your smartphone wouldn't 65 00:03:39,168 --> 00:03:39,668 shatter. 66 00:03:39,668 --> 00:03:41,504 OK, cool. 67 00:03:41,504 --> 00:03:44,440 Buildings could be bolstered against natural disasters, even 68 00:03:44,440 --> 00:03:45,141 cooler. 69 00:03:45,141 --> 00:03:46,776 And then somehow they bring it down. 70 00:03:46,776 --> 00:03:48,811 Wine glasses are reassuringly safe. 71 00:03:48,811 --> 00:03:50,579 [LAUGHTER] 72 00:03:50,579 --> 00:03:52,348 Was that really a problem? 73 00:03:52,348 --> 00:03:54,083 I don't know. 74 00:03:54,083 --> 00:03:56,886 And what they did, fabrication was 75 00:03:56,886 --> 00:03:59,856 conducted using an aerodynamic levitation furnace where 76 00:03:59,856 --> 00:04:02,625 ingredients were floated in the air using oxygen gas 77 00:04:02,625 --> 00:04:05,395 and melted together using CO2 lasers, 78 00:04:05,395 --> 00:04:08,331 and they get a transparent superglass with 50% alumina. 79 00:04:08,331 --> 00:04:12,335 That was so hard to do because the aluminum didn't 80 00:04:12,335 --> 00:04:13,603 want to be a glass. 81 00:04:13,603 --> 00:04:17,940 It wanted to go and become a metal, a crystal. 82 00:04:17,940 --> 00:04:19,409 But by doing it this way, they were 83 00:04:19,409 --> 00:04:22,712 able to capture it in the disorder. 84 00:04:22,712 --> 00:04:23,112 All right, have a great night.