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These are samples that have just come back
from the International Space Station.
They were flown in an experiment called BCAT-5.
BCAT-5 was made for many different teams.
The first team is from Procter and Gamble,
and they were looking at product collapse,
and as you can imagine, when a product collapses on earth,
it's quite different than when it collapses in space,
and if you take away gravity,
you get to see the effect throughout the sample.
So it tells you a lot more
and it really helps your understanding
of what's going on.
The next two samples are from Harvard and it's part
of a series that they're working on where they're trying to find
out where a critical point is in the model system,
and that is when you can have a fluid that's liquid or gas
or something above that if you raise the temperature
and pressure, this model system actually works
at room temperature, it's much easier to study,
and they're able to look at phase diagrams
and they're finding unexpected surprises, pleasant surprises.
The next three samples are from Simon Fraser University
with Barbara Frisken and Art Bailey,
and that's a collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency
and NASA, and what happens there is a competition
between crystallization and phase separation,
and for the first time they actually see crystallization
arrest phase separation, so instead of the top
and the bottom forming, they would actually see it begin
to form and then freeze.
And this has not been seen before.
Another pleasant surprise.
This ninth sample, this is from New York University,
and this was Paul Chaikin and Andy Hollingsworth's work,
and they actually saw, for the first time, seeded growth,
which was predicted years ago by Daan Frenkel
where if you put seeds along the wall, and they did the top half
in this case, they actually see a different kind of crystal form
than on an unseeded wall from the bottom,
and they would see many crystals in the top,
which is heterogeneous nucleation,
versus a single crystal or big crystals in the bottom,
which is homogeneous nucleation, so to be able to control that
and control the properties
of crystallization is actually quite exciting.
And this last sample is from UPenn, Arjun Yodh's group,
where they were actually looking at how it is
if you can make crystals from particles that change size
with temperature, you can raise the temperature and melt them
and then cool it and let it recrystallize.
If you keep repeating that cycle, it anneals,
and every time it does that, the particles are closer
to where they'd have to be to make a perfect crystal.
So that's actually quite exciting.
All of these samples are precursors
for what we call the Advanced Colloids Experiment,
where instead of looking at a macroscopic level,
we'll actually be able to see what's happening
at a microscopic level
and we can link the results between the two.
And this is leading to not only an understanding
of fundamental science, but many applications like self-assembly,
self-replication, and colloidal engineering.