Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

Healing polymers by light

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Polymers that can be healed could extend the lifetime of materials in so many applications. Chemists from the US and Switzerland have for the first time developed polymers that can be healed by exposure to ultraviolet light alone.

In the recent years, many strategies have been developed for healing polymers. In many cases, they are healed by heating to the glass transition temperature which transforms the polymer from its hard state into a molten state enabling the polymer chains to reform. Unfortunately, this technique is slow and difficult to use in practice. To overcome the problem, a method was needed to manipulate polymeric structure at the molecular level.

Burnworth et al. used supramolecular polymers which are lower molecular mass polymer units held together in long chains by metal-ligand bonds. These non-covalent bonds are weaker than the bonds that hold hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a water molecule but strong enough to enable the new material to possess polymer-like properties.

Metal atoms have special affinity to electron rich ligands. This allows metal atoms to form metal-ligand bonds in a polymer with ligand groups present in it its structure.

More importantly, working with these metal-ligand bonds has enabled the researchers to manipulate the bonds at the molecular level with light energy. A polymer sheet deliberately cut to 50% of the film thickness was exposed to UV light in the range of 330 – 390 nm. It was observed (as seen in the picture) that the polymer ‘healed’ by filling up the cut that was made earlier.

Metal-ligand bonds of the kind present in this polymer allow for the conversion of light energy into heat. In this case, the light energy causes the surface of the polymer to rapidly heat up to 220 °C in a very short time. The healing occurs in this state when polymer is allowed to flow and re-arrange. The advantage of using light energy lies in its specificity. Unlike heat energy, it is possible to direct light energy to precisely those areas which require repair.

Also because different metal-ligand complexes absorb light at different wavelengths it should be possible to tune the wavelength of light needed for healing. Thus, one can imagine that it may be possible to heal a broken mobile phone case just by keeping it in sunlight.

Reference: Mark Burnworth et al., Nature, 472, 334.

Letting go off expectations and goals?

Akshat Rathi8 Comments

Leo Babauta writes about living a life with no goals and without expectations. Yes, the blog is called zen habits and may be its only zen monks who are able to do what Leo wants people to do. That would have been ok if he wrote this for zen monks alone. But that is not the case, he writes this for everyone. I find this to be a problem.

David Damron wrote about why Leo is wrong about goals. His five reasons are that:

  1. A goal can teach you how to handle your emotions
  2. Focus on a goal can deliver measurable results
  3. The journey is more appreciated when you set your sights on “Destination X”
  4. There’s faith that you will achieve a goal by just being and then there’s faith in focused action that you will achieve a goal
  5. A community is far likelier to back a goal than a way of life

Leo’s rebuttals to all those points run around one argument – I have lived a life without goals and I know that it works better. I suppose that his arguments for living without expectations may also lie on the same thread of arguments.

At present, I find this philosophy of living very hard to digest. If you can live a life like Leo where you are self-employed and make enough money to support your family then it might be possible to live that way.

Yes, theoretically I’d love to be able to live without goals or expectations. I’d like to do whatever takes my fancy like spend my time climbing the mountains, swimming the seas and enjoying the peace. All would have been well if I was in a Himalayan monastery supported by philanthropy to search for the ‘ultimate truth’. But that is not the case, I live a life that we have built for ourselves after many millennia of organised human effort.

I am not trying to be philosophical when I say that this life that I am able to live is better than the life that I would have had, had everyone of us lived without goals or expectations. It is a better life from a utilitarian perspective. Sure there are many more who are poor and suffering from the time when Buddha walked the earth. But there are also many many more who are able to experience new things, live longer and have the ability to contribute to humanity than those who did in Buddha’s times.

We have achieved what we have through innovation and hard work.

Many times the achievement has been possible only because of organised hard work. Organisations and institutions would fail without goals and a clear vision.

One may argue that at least for innovation it might be better to live a free life. We can explore and learn new things and in the process develop new things. Sure that is one way to look at innovation. Innovation is very a murky area to explore but one thing we know is that there is no fixed formula to innovate. But in certain situations, we might have been able to innovate only because we were pushed by goals and expectations.

I am not trying to destroy Leo’s idea. I think there is value in the advice but it has limited applicability. If everyone adopts this philosophy of living without goals and expectations, many things will not work and we may not progress.

Being young ain’t easy

Akshat Rathi4 Comments
courtesy: gapigvoid.com

These are not my words. They were written by Hugh McLeod (one of my internet superheroes) and, as it shows, he is certainly much older than I am. The reason I am sharing this with you is because those words made me feel better and they might make you feel better.

His work has this remarkable tendency to either kick you in the butt and get you to do the work or make you realise that being kicked in the butt is not such a bad thing and thus, help you appreciate the work you do. The above certainly has the latter effect.

Hugh says:

Once our youth is gone forever, and it always goes eventually, despite our best efforts to hang onto it, it’s tempting to idolize it, to look at it something far more glorious and emotionally satisfying than it actually was at the time.

And although, I am still in the thick of my youth, I can relate to this feeling of my past being ‘something far more glorious and emotionally satisfying than it actually was at the time’. When I write about my days in high school, I only write about the happy memories. And it is not because I want to write about happy memories, it is because those are the only memories that I have remaining of those days. My brain’s done the dirty work of removing the bad bits out. I suspect that this is the same thing that must happen to those much older than me. Making them see a rosier picture of their young selves.

This happiness filtering that our brain does might be a good thing. It might have some really good evolutionary reasons. But even if it does, it is not something that makes me proud. I have a bad feeling that not just do we lose the bad memories but we also lose the lessons (not all but many) that we learnt from experiencing those ‘bad’ things.

Ok, I don’t have any data to back me up and these conclusion are based on plain observations. I hope some of you are able to relate to it though. I draw such a harsh conclusion on the basis of having met and known people who are much older than me and having interacted with them at all levels for quite some time. People seem to struggle with the same things in life over and over again. A  20-something may be in the exact same situation (barring a few things) as a 50-something about an important life decision.

Enough of the cynicism though. Hugh’s poster made me feel better as I said before. I was happy about the fact that these turbulent years of my youth are actually quite hard and it is not all in my mind that I perceive them to be hard.

It is hard to appreciate the difficulties of being a young one because all around you people keep saying, ‘But you are young, you have so much energy to do all those things’. It makes you feel as if you aren’t making effective use of the fountain of infinite energy that comes with being young. It is as if having so much ‘energy’ is enough to manufacture the required amount of motivation to do things.

And then of course there is the comment on how many opportunities lie ahead of the youth. ‘Oh you are still quite young and you have so many years to try new things and achieve greatness’. That might be but we are also only just entering the professional world and will need some time to learn the art of doing things. We are also utterly confused and some times clueless about many things. And throwing around the word opportunities isn’t enough to actually turn them into real dividends.

Hugh is damn right, ‘Being young is difficult. Insanely so.’