Those little black dots on car windows — everybody who’s ever sat in a car has noticed them, but nobody ever told us what they are for (if they even serve a purpose whatsoever). But they are actually much more important than you would think.
(And let’s skip the esthetic value altogether, although it definitely is there.)
From the 1950s and 1960s onward, car manufacturers started to use a strong adhesive to hold car windows in place, rather than metal trim. It looked rather awful, so somehow the traces of the glue had to be hidden. Enter the black dotted rims we see around car windows — the so-called “frits.”
Frits are made from ceramic paint, and they are baked into the window (yes indeed). Besides hiding the adhesive, they hold the glue in place, which in turn holds the windows in place.
Very nice, indeed.
They also provide temperature control. To get the glass of windows and windshields to be bent the way it is bent, the glass is heated up. As the black-painted glass heats up faster than the rest of the window, the dots are there to distribute the heat more evenly, so as to prevent the windshield from overly curving in the heat.
Little dark dots preventing glass windows from bending — very nice, indeed.
So the next time you sit in a car (which is very soon), remember how important the tiny black window dots are for your comfort and safety —
And wholeheartedly praise The Mighty Frits.
You can travel from England to France with your car in just 30 minutes. Mind blowing! Isn’t it ?
This is Euro Tunnel
It is a railway tunnel built to connect England with Europe. With this tunnel you can travel by the normal rail coach or in your own vehicle. It’s just like a train you can drive into, it goes under the seabed and only takes 30 minutes because it connects southern England to northern France. There are different sections for cars as well as lorries.
It is somewhat narrow on the inside, so you have to drive carefully until you reach your parking spot. You’re required to use your first gear, hand brake and also open your windows halfway down to dissipate pressure. When the journey starts you can see out the windows, however it becomes completely dark as soon as you get under the ground.
During the journey you can get out of your car and walk around. Though there isn’t much room apart from the toilets, there’s also some safety doors between a few cars. At the end of the journey, all you have to do is drive forward towards the exit into France.
If you had a chance, would you travel through this fascinating tunnel?
Somebody figured out how to make a material that is 200 times stronger than the strongest steel, transmits heat into electricity, and is extremely lightweight. Its discovery resulted in the Nobel Prize for Physics being given “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.”
Graphene is classified as two-dimensional: it is one atom thick (not pure two-dimensional but as close as we can come) and this form creates several fascinating properties.
So why hasn’t this material exploded? It’s so useful, it could make phones last a week, charge in seconds, and could provide unbelievable body armor.
Well, unfortunately, producing it large scale is super hard. Peeling down graphite on a nanoscale to one atom thick is incredibly hard since just interacting with atoms at that level is nearly impossible. Being unable to stack it quickly, atom by atom, is still the only reason why graphene hasn’t radically altered our lives. Further, we still haven’t been able to use it as a super capacitor. If we are able to do so, everything will change extremely quickly and this could become a massive technological leap.
Eventually, someone is going to discover how to create graphene quickly… and when they do, I’d recommend investing. It isn’t every day that a trillion dollar market is created.
One amazing material that not many people know about is called aerogel. Aerogel is basically any gel where the liquid component in the gel is replaced with a gas. Basically a molecular sponge.
This makes the gel very, very, very light. Barely heavier than air. It looks like frozen smoke and is bluish and transparent. It has so little thermal conductivity that a fairly thin sheet of it will protect you from a sustained blast from a flamethrower.
I am still amazed by this new material that has come to be known as vanta black. It is simply a layer of carbon nanotubes stuck onto a surface that makes it absorb 99.96% of the light hitting it, making it the blackest black possible. The effect is mind boggling. See image below. It would be cool just to have a piece so that you could make any flat surface appear to have a hole or to have your own mini monolith like the one from 2001-space odyssey.
