Metal:How It Works BBC4 Midnight.

highlandsflyer

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Looks interesting, BBC4, midnight tonight. Part 1 of 3.

"Professor Mark Miodownik travels to Israel to trace the history of our love affair with gleaming, lustrous metal. He learns how we first extracted glinting copper from dull rock and used it to shape our world and reveals how our eternal quest for lighter, stronger metals led us to forge hard, sharp steel from malleable iron and to create complex alloys in order to conquer the skies.

He investigates metals at the atomic level to reveal mysterious properties such as why they get stronger when they are hit, and he discovers how metal crystals can be grown to survive inside one of our most extreme environments - the jet engine."
 
Metals typically consist of close-packed atoms, meaning that the atoms are arranged like closely packed spheres. Two packing motifs are common, one being body-centered cubic wherein each metal atom is surrounded by eight equivalent atoms. The other main motif is face-centered cubic where the metal atoms are surrounded by six neighboring atoms. Several metals adopt both structures, depending on the temperature.

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Watched them the first time around and thought they would be good for teachings at our school. (also available as torrents and on BBC website under their clips section)
Luckily they then made and all in one program I could use based on the series.
Oddly it's not as good as the full program.

Anyone watch the little bit on Dara OBriain's Science club on the bicycle ?
It's only a short bit (with a really lovely looking bike) and mainly some info on the wheel.
But I like the whole program anyway
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00zxmqj
 
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