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Happy Pride Month 2022!!!

Faust the Crow loves you even more than she did last year!

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update done with midterms now but there’s finals apparently? how is this legal. sidenote just got confirmation that i will be presenting the culmination of my research this year in front of my lab group this afternoon and i am very nervous wish me luck

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am currently writing a matlab script to analyze datasets i do not recognize myself

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Hello I hope your midterms went/are going well!

thank u thank u! they are still going & will be until two weeks from today how bonkers is that

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i feel like im letting everyone down bc i dont really have anything else interesting to say about concrete. i should have rationed it better. got too excited

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lol really enjoy how earlier today i was like “think i have food poisoning” when my tummy hurt even though it has never been that and always been my period. guess what? it was again.

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No more girlbossing i want to girl rest girl sleep girl lay down etc

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Astrology doesn’t work on me, if those planets want me dead so bad they can start blasting lasers at me like adults

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I love music :) *RUNS INTO A WALL

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hi i would like to hear about the self healing bacteria concrete if it is not too much hassle :) have a nice day either way!

heheh ok here we go. so concrete has all these microcracks right and essentially they make up much of the weakness that concrete has. not much way to fix them, they form as a part of shrinkage that occurs as cement dehydrates (either by reacting all the water or as it evaporates to the outside environment). really tiny cracks. anyways there are these bacteria (there are several but some continuously mentioned are Bacillus Pasteurii, Bacillus Subtilis) that, given a calcium source, can precipitate calcium carbonate which fills the cracks and "heals"(!!!!!) the concrete. this is where i get a little confused but i'm pretty sure there are two methods of "applying" the bacteria - both involve including the bacteria in the aggregate (pretty much just rocks) and mixing it into the concrete while it's being made. according to this article i'm skimming rn i think one mechanism encapsulates the bacteria in a "polymer based coating layer" so when the concrete cracks the encapsulation ruptures and the bacteria solution is released into the crack via capillary action to do its thing. other benefits of using bacteria are that they increase compressive strength and decrease water penetration which helps w the longevity of the concrete aka is more sustainable! i'm not a chem person so sorry idk if i can explain in more depth bc it literally breaks my brain but if you'd like the article is "Bacteria based self healing concrete - A Review" and is available on google scholar! and yeah. so bacteria are cool

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good suggestion thanks. unfortunately pukicho is not responding to my calls so im not sure i can get anyone to turn me into concrete now

hi

now that some people actually see this stuff the only thing i can think to do is leave. like my fight or flight has been activated. any other suggestions?

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ah. um. i suppose technically but like you aren’t solving the actual problem which is that your original concrete is deteriorating. so any concrete you put on top of it will also deteriorate faster. maybe exponential relationship here? i dont have enough brain cells to sort that out right now but it maybe seems accurate. so short term yes. put more concrete on it. long term.. perhaps not

Are you in a Merp kind of mood, or a Derp kind of mood?

I literally encase you in concrete, I literally submerge you in stone until you die and people walk on you for 200 years

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hi

now that some people actually see this stuff the only thing i can think to do is leave. like my fight or flight has been activated. any other suggestions?

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interesting take. elaborate?

Are you in a Merp kind of mood, or a Derp kind of mood?

I literally encase you in concrete, I literally submerge you in stone until you die and people walk on you for 200 years

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Hi! This is Jane's partner hehe 💛👋🥰

HI NICK hope ur doing well :)

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Came here from Pukicho's post

I would genuinely follow you to hear you talk about concrete

I DON'T KNOW WHY, BUT THAT REALLY PEAKED MY INTEREST

omgomgomg ok so many fun facts. also welcome. so i work in this lab at [large research university] on mix designs for concrete to maximize the amount of carbon dioxide it's able to absorb while hydrating (part of the ...let's say drying process, concrete/cement is very chemically involved lol even i dont completely understand all of it). basically Portland cement (just a type of cement, ik there are more than one, insane) has a huge carbon footprint so trying to replace it with as much other material that has similar properties but is more eco friendly is a huge thing right now! portlandite (aka calcium hydroxide) is one such material that also has the added bonus of entraining carbon dioxide as a part of the reactions it goes through when mixed with water!!! we can't completely replace cement with portlandite bc strength is affected etc etc so what i'm working on is trying to figure out how much we can replace while keeping concrete's other important properties so it's still functional. i hope this is interesting lmao i also read a research paper once about creating self healing concrete w bacteria if anybody is interested...

tl;dr - concrete is really really cool and can help fight climate change also im going to try and publish my research paper later this year if anybody would be interested in reading it :)))