It’s Alchemy, I tell you!

Turning cement into metal?

Apparently so:

“This phenomenon of trapping electrons and turning liquid cement into liquid metal was found recently, but not explained in detail until now,” Benmore said. “Now that we know the conditions needed to create trapped electrons in materials we can develop and test other materials to find out if we can make them conduct electricity in this way.”

The results were reported May 27 in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the article “Network topology for the formation of solvated electrons in binary CaO–Al2O3 composition glasses”.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-cement-metal.html#jCp

 

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Catching Up on Interesting Stuff

Over the last little while,  have come across some very interesting articles and such which I want to post about – but simply don’t have the capacity to fully explore.  So, I’d like to catch up by presenting a whole bunch of them in one post for your pleasure!

UPDATE:  A pregnant British woman is arrested for walking down the street in Great Britain and carrying the British flag.  Really!

Interesting DIY inventions are coming out of China.

The mystery of the ‘Skeleton Lake’ (India) seems to be solved.

Were the Eastern Crusades defensive wars?

On the copyright/erosion-of-privacy/governments-spying-on-citizens/corporatism front:

Meanwhile, in Science:

And in the economy:

Islam:

Political Islam/Creeping Sharia:

General politics:

And if you want more links to various articles to read, check out Steynian 468nth.