- Colloidal particles, that mimic atoms, form a gel with the structure of glass. Credit: Paddy Royall, University of Bristol, UK
Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.
The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman's plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.
The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is. It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a "jammed" state of matter — somewhere between liquid and solid — that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass are in something like suspended animation, unable to reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbors. So even though glass is a hard substance, it never quite becomes a proper solid, according to chemists and materials scientists.
The deceptively liquid-like behavior of glass can be seen when you look at glass in the windows of an old building. The glass begins to sag and distort internally over the centuries, due to the effect of gravity.
Work so far has concentrated on trying to understand the traffic jam, but now Paddy Royall from the University of Bristol, with colleagues in Canberra and Tokyo, has shown that glass fails to be a solid due to the special atomic structures that form in a glass when it cools.
Icosahedron jams
Some materials crystallize as they cool, arranging their atoms into a highly regular pattern called a lattice, Royall said, but although glass "wants" to be a crystal, as it cools the atoms become jammed in a nearly random arrangement, preventing it from forming a regular lattice.
In the 1950s, Sir Charles Frank in the Physics Department at Bristol suggested that the arrangement of the "jam" should form what is known as an icosahedron, but at the time he was unable to prove it.
An icosahedron is like a 3-D pentagon, and just as you cannot tile a floor with pentagons, you cannot fill 3-D space with icosahedrons, Royall explained. That is, you can't make a lattice out of pentagons.
When it comes to glass, Frank thought, there is a competition between crystal formation and pentagons that prevents the construction of a crystal. If you cool a liquid down and it makes a lot of pentagons and the pentagons survive, the crystal cannot form.
It turns out that Frank was right, Royall said, and his team proved this experimentally. You can't watch what happens to atoms as they cool because they are too small, so Royall and his colleagues used special particles called colloids that mimic atoms, but are large enough to be visible using state-of-the-art microscopy. The team cooled some down and watched what happened.
What they found was that the gel these particles formed also "wants" to be a crystal, but it fails to become one due to the formation of icosahedra-like structures — exactly as Frank had predicted.
"It is the formation of these structures that underlie jammed materials and explains why a glass is a glass and not a liquid — or a solid," Royall said.
The findings are detailed in the June 22 issue of the journal Nature Materials. The research was supported in part by a grant from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology as well as the Royal Society.
Preventing jetliner disasters
Knowing the structure formed by atoms as a glass cools represents a major breakthrough in the understanding of meta-stable materials and will allow further development of new strong yet light materials called metallic glasses, he said, already used to make some golf clubs. This stuff is generally shiny black in color, not transparent, due to having a lot of free electrons (think of mercury in an old thermometer).
Metals normally crystallize when they cool, however stress builds up along the boundaries between crystals, which can lead to metal failure.
For example, the world's first jetliner, the British built De Havilland Comet, fell out of the sky due to metal failure. When metals are be made to cool with the same internal structure as a glass and without crystal grain boundaries, they are less likely to fail, Royall said. Metallic glasses could be suitable for a whole range of products, beyond golf clubs, that need to be flexible such as aircraft wings and engine parts, he said.
Glass is not what it seems
Royall is part of a group of scientists who think that if you wait long enough, perhaps billions of years, all glass will eventually crystallize into a true solid. In other words, glass is not in an equilibrium state, (although it appears that way to us during our limited lifetimes).
"This is not universally accepted," Royall told LiveScience. "Our work will go some way to making that point more accepted. I think there is a growing weight of evidence that certainly many glasses 'want' to be a crystal."
Still, glass "looks like a liquid and this is one of the great riddles that we have gone some way to solving," Royall said. "It has always been thought that glass has same structure as a liquid, and that's why it looks like it. It does not have same structure as liquid."
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ubak's Journal
Where did our financial stability go?
Changes to the US economy over the past 4 decades have left Americans richer but less secure. A new book explains why anxiety is rising along with incomes.
If the economy is so great, why do things feel so bad? If you've even asked yourself that question, read the following book.
Peter Gosselin's just-published "High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families" is the best explanation that I've read of why a substantial majority of us feel less secure, more anxious and increasingly worried about the future even though the national economy has done so well over the past 10 to 20 years.
I've wrestled with this question repeatedly in my column during the past few years, well before $4-a-gallon gas, falling home prices and rising unemployment provided a short-term focus for our anxieties. After the current economic slowdown is over and we've returned to "normal" good times, I think we're likely to be left puzzling over this question again. In e-mails that you've sent to me over the past few years, you've phrased the worry like this:
- The average Joe and Jane are getting a raw deal.
- Our kids won't live as well as we do.
- Government and business are ruled by greed.
- The American way of life is over.
- It's all about to come crashing down on us.
- Nobody cares about hard work and thrift anymore.
However it's phrased, though, the message is the same: People are worried, really worried, about the future for themselves and their families.
The big surveys confirm that anecdotal anxiety. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index, for instance, dropped to 57.2 in May. That's the lowest since October 1992. Ask about the direction of the economy in coming months, and the index drops even lower: 45.7 in May, down from 50 in April. The index uses confidence in 1985 as its base of 100.
So right now, we're only about half as confident about the future as we were in 1985.
Peter Gosselin's book is available from MSN Shopping. Click here to buy it.
Per capita income is up
What's so extraordinary is that this tide of anxiety has risen during a period of extraordinary national economic growth.In the past 10 years, from 1997 through the end of 2007, the U.S. economy has grown to $11.6 trillion from just $8.7 trillion, adjusted for inflation. That's real economic growth of about 2.9% a year. The picture looks much the same when you adjust for a growing population. Real per capita gross domestic product, which equates pretty well with per capita income, has climbed 2% a year, on average, from 1997 to 2007.
In other words, if you look at the national averages, we're somewhere between 20% and 33% better off than we were 10 years ago. So why aren't we dancing in the streets?
The pundits, yours truly included, have offered a variety of reasons:
- Incomes are a lot less equal than they used to be. In 1979, for example, the top 1% of earners had an income 9.4 times that of the average person in the bottom 90%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. By 2006, that ratio had climbed to almost 20-to-1.
- The economy has become more uncertain, with give-backs, outsourcing, off-shoring and downsizing of jobs. And that's been especially true for the relatively well-paid workers in the manufacturing economy.
- Growth in national income in the past decade went disproportionately to corporate profits and not to worker incomes. Even though nonfarm productivity rose at an average rate of 2.63% from 1997 to 2007, the average hourly wage for production workers climbed just 0.79% annually. Corporate profits captured more of the national income in 2006, the peak of the recent economic cycle, than in any other year on record.
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That's all true, author Gosselin notes, but it's not sufficient to explain our deep funk. For example, while rising income inequality may have disastrous long-term effects on a democratic society, Americans have a long tradition of identifying with, rather than resenting, the rich guy. The hope has always been that someday we'll walk in those very comfortable shoes.
To understand why so many of us are so anxious and indeed deeply fearful about the future, you have to look at what happens when something -- an accident, an illness, the loss of a job -- goes wrong in our lives. The consequences of that something, Gosselin says, are a lot worse than they used to be.
Climbing higher, feeling vulnerable
In the past three decades, Gosselin writes in "High Wire," the typical income for a family right in the middle of the U.S. economic pack has climbed about 23%. From $56,375 in the early 1970s, the income in constant 2007 dollars rose to $69,406 by the mid-2000s.But the variability of that family's income has also increased. In the early 1970s, annual income in any one year swung in a range of plus or minus $9,546. In other words, a bad year might turn that $56,375 into 17% less, or $46,829. By the mid-2000s, the range of that annual swing had climbed to plus or minus $17,692. A bad year in those later years could turn that larger income of $69,406 into $51,714. That's potentially 25% less in any one year.
The increase in variability hasn't been limited to just one part of the income pyramid. For families in the 10th percentile, those who make more than only 10% of all U.S. families, income variability started the period at plus or minus 30% and climbed to almost 50% by the mid-2000s. In any one year, the income of a family in this bracket could deviate by 50% up or down from its average.
For families in the 90th percentile, who earn more than 90% of U.S. families, income variability climbed from a swing of 16% up or down ($16,860 in the 1970s) to one of 28% up or down ($43,000 in the 2000s). In dollar terms, that's a potentially disastrous difference.
Choices brought us here
As Gosselin writes, "Stop for a moment and imagine what would happen to your life right now if your annual income plunged by $43,000. Even if it eventually rebounded -- and not all do -- could you keep up your car and mortgage payments, continue your kid's music lessons and keep children on the hockey team?"No wonder we're worried.
The increase in income volatility that shows up in these numbers isn't an accident of the U.S. or global economy, Gosselin argues. As a society, we've pursued choices that have led to this increase in volatility. For example, we've replaced pensions that had guaranteed annual payouts with individual retirement accounts and 401(k)s, where the payout is determined by how much we save and how well our individual investment choices turn out. And we're increasingly replacing employer-provided health insurance with private policies that, when disaster strikes, provide little coverage or none at all.
Peter Gosselin's book is available from MSN Shopping. Click here to buy it.
Gosselin, however, makes a convincing statistical case that the gains have been outpaced by the losses. We've gradually discovered, for example, that most people are terrible managers of their own retirement money. Most people, in this case, includes the more than 20 winners of the Nobel Prize in economics that Gosselin interviewed.
(My favorite is the admission by Harry Markowitz, who had laid the foundations of all Wall Street theories of how to build a safely diversified portfolio. When he was asked how he wanted his retirement money invested, he said 50% stocks, 50% bonds. "In retrospect," Markowitz told Gosselin, "I should have done something more sophisticated.")
The best-laid plans
If the statistics don't bring you around to Gosselin's conclusions, his vivid anecdotes about how this system can devastate the lives of people who have planned intelligently and soberly to take care of themselves should at least make you think about the system we've built:- There's the story of a woman who was denied cancer treatment because her insurance company claimed she hadn't disclosed her illness when it wrote her policy -- even though the woman's medical records from her oncologist were in the insurer's files all along.
- There's the story of a couple who discovered the insurance policy that "guaranteed" to pay replacement cost if their house burned would cover only half the cost of rebuilding.
- There's the story of the man who lost $150,000 when his 401(k) plan ignored his instructions to sell -- and who then found out that federal law denied him any right to sue to recover his losses.
All these stories are about people who tried to follow the rules. They weren't deadbeats. Or stupid. Or wasteful. Many of the people who Gosselin profiles were insurance agents, company vice presidents and accountants. They thought they understood the game, and they thought they had plans in place to protect themselves from the worst consequences of the accidents that life deals out so randomly.
We're anxious because the lazy, the greedy and the slothful don't show up among Gosselin's stories of financial train wrecks. We're anxious because these people are like us, perhaps indeed more farsighted and resourceful than we are, and still they lost. That's what's scary.
Because if it can happen to them, despite their planning and foresight, it can happen to any one of us.
Updates to Jubak's Picks
Sell Joy Global (JOYG, news, msgs): I'm going to sell Joy Global out of Jubak's Picks with this column and buy Gorman-Rupp (GRC, news, msgs) as a way to cut the risk in my portfolio at a time when stocks are looking vulnerable to another move downward while retaining my exposure to the boom in global infrastructure.The price-to-earnings ratio on Joy Global has climbed to 31.2 times trailing 12-month earnings. That's high at a time when the Standard & Poor's 500 Index ($INX) is trading at 19.5 times earnings. A P/E ratio like that makes a stock vulnerable, especially in a nervous market, to a big dip on any miss in quarterly earnings. And Joy Global isn't exactly a paragon of earnings predictability: The company has missed Wall Street consensus estimates in three of the past five quarters.
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As of June 24, I'm selling these shares out of Jubak's Picks with a 46% gain since I added them to the portfolio Oct. 30. (Full disclosure: I will sell my personal position in Joy Global three days after this column is posted.)
Buy Gorman-Rupp (GRC, news, msgs): By switching into Gorman-Rupp and out of Joy Global, I'm staying long infrastructure but trading into pumps and out of mining equipment.
Gorman-Rupp reported earnings of 43 cents a share for the first quarter of 2008, a 43% increase from the first quarter of 2007. Gross margins climbed to 24%, well above the five-year average gross margin of 21.3%. Fueled by growth in international sales of its pumps and pump controls for use in the oil, agriculture, fire prevention, construction and industrial sectors, the company's order backlog grew to $116 million, about 1.5 times quarterly sales, at the end of the first quarter.
International sales account for almost 30% of total sales. With Wall Street projecting 2008 earnings growth of 27.5%, this stock offers high growth at a bargain P/E ratio of 23.6 times trailing 12-month earnings.
As of June 24, I'm adding these shares to Jubak's Picks with a target price of $49 a share by March 2009. (Full disclosure: I will add shares of Gorman-Rupp to my personal portfolio three days after this column is posted.)
Developments on past columns
"Inflation from Asia: The next crisis": Inflation numbers took a huge jump in India in early June. Announced June 2, the wholesale price index, the country's key inflation measure, jumped to 11% for the week ending June 7. That's the highest rate of inflation since February 1995.The Mumbai Stock Exchange's 30-stock Sensex index fell 3.4% on the day of the inflation announcement on fears that the Indian Reserve Bank would now have to raise interest rates from an already high 8%. The Indian stock market finished the day down 28% for 2008 and now trades at prices last seen in August 2007. Despite the drop in 2008, the Indian market is still up 55% from the beginning of 2006. Editor's note: Jim Jubak, the Web's most-read investing writer, posts a new Jubak's Journal every Tuesday and Friday. Please note that recommendations in Jubak's Picks are for a 12- to 18-month time horizon. For suggestions on helping navigate the treacherous interest-rate environment, see Jubak's portfolio of Dividend Stocks for Income Investors. For picks with a truly long-term perspective, see Jubak's 50 Best Stocks in the World or Future Fantastic 50 Portfolio. E-mail Jubak at jjmail@microsoft.com.
At the time of publication, Jim Jubak owned or controlled shares in the following companies mentioned in this column: Joy Global. He does not own short positions in any company mentioned in this column.
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