Episode 102 - Nanomaterials, Sustainability and Space

Brad: 00:00:00

What is up, Brad fans? How you doing? How you living? Thank you for tuning into the show.

Today we are going to talk about a subject that I never in my wildest dreams believed I would be covering, and that is nanomaterials. Why? Because I almost failed chemistry multiple times.

And material science, nanomaterials is really about the chemical and physical properties of certain materials that make them, you know, useful for different things.

And as we are now finding out, nanomaterials, we'll give you the definition of that in the episode, have extremely useful properties in terms of things like batteries, electricity, electricity generation, you know, chip technology, materials just making them stronger and lightweight. All of these things, you may have heard of graphene.

And to help us understand all of these things is a researcher from the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering from Dublin at Dublin City University, Connor Boland.

And I first met Connor because I wrote about one of his studies in which he describes a way that a potential Mars colony could create some of these really useful, interesting nanomaterials on Mars using very little equipment, you know, using material that's already there on Mars and very simple equipment that they could. That they could bring with them on a spaceship and in and of itself, that's fascinating. Sustainable space travel and Mars bases and all that.

But how he came to this idea and his philosophy for research is also incredibly interesting to me because in our initial conversations, he talked about this approach that he has where it's a do no harm.

It's like a Hippocratic oath, where you look at the materials that we have, the things that are available, and say, if I'm going to make something, if I'm going to engineer material, use it for some way, can I do that in a way that doesn't actually harm the environment or our health? Because what's the point of doing something if we're producing a net negative? And I love that philosophy.

It tracks with this movement called green chemistry that I've covered before, where, same thing, chemists decided, hey, we're using all these toxic solvents and reagents and super high temperatures, which are, you know, really carbon intensive. All of this kind of stuff. This is what we're using to build all the stuff that we want to build.

If we just say we're not going to use those things, can we still solve the problem and create the things that we want to create? And by and large, yes, you can.

And so there's this interesting philosophy, and we talk about it in the episode, where there's kind of two ways to think about it. Is this a constraint?

Are we putting a box around ourselves or are we actually unleashing ourselves, letting us go, letting the chains go in terms of looking at all the materials that are out there, all the possibilities that are out there.

So from a philosophy point of view, this is actually a really interesting episode as well and a really interesting conversation that I really, really enjoyed. We'll learn about nanomaterials, what they are, why they're so fascinating.

The fact that they're kind of all around us in everyday materials can be turned into a nanomaterial with, you know, in some cases a kitchen blender.

We talk a little bit about how these technologies sort of trickle out into the world, how, how knowledge from the lab ends up, you know, getting into products and stuff that we use. We of course, talk about the space travel stuff and again, this philosophy of research and some peculiarities about academia and academic research.

So really, really great conversation. Really enjoyed it.

And I had to leave a clip in at the beginning of our love fest for Bob's Burgers, our shared love of the animated TV show Bob's Burgers. So that's, that's what you'll hear at the beginning. Love Bob's Burgers. Had to give it a shout out.

Thank you to again to Connor for, for being such a great guest and for taking the time to be on the show. One last thing before we start. Of course, Rate, review, subscribe please, all of those things.

Wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube shows, the shows, full length shows and clips of the shows are now going up on YouTube. Subscribe like all of that great stuff helps boost us in the algorithms. Gets our, gets our content out there. By our, I mean my.

The royal me, the royal we. I'm the only one that does this show. So thank you all for listening. Give me a like, review, subscribe all of those things. I really appreciate it.

And now here is my conversation with Connor Boland.

Brad: 00:05:10

But yeah, so really casual.

Conor: 00:05:12

Cool. Sounds good. I'm only just noticing your Tina card behind you. Love Bob's Burgers.

Brad: 00:05:23

My wife and I are big fans and she made me, she made me a card for. I think it was a birthday or anniversary or something.

Conor: 00:05:30

Yeah.

Brad: 00:05:31

So I think it says something about like ain't no buts about it or something. Like, like she did some kind of pun or whatever. Yeah. But I love it. I keep, I keep it posted up.

Conor: 00:05:41

Yeah, mine. Yeah, it was about bots and zombies. Yeah. Yeah.

Brad: 00:05:49

I love this as you do.

Conor: 00:05:50

Right.

Brad: 00:05:51

I was surprised that. I'm kind of surprised that. That show because it's like, not a lot of people. It kind of flies under the radar. Like, not a lot of people know it.

And I've tried to, like, recommend it to a few people and they're just like, I don't. I don't really like it. I don't get it. And I'm just like, I don't know. It's like one of the funniest shows I've seen.

Conor: 00:06:09

Like, I think, like, the first episode is, like, amazing. So I'm just like. I don't know how anyone doesn't, like, immediate, like, get into it. Like, just. I love Gene.

It's just like the whole thing of just being like, like the first, like five seconds into the show and it's just like, oh, no, no one wants to molest Eugene because you're fat. And it's just like, it's so absurd. It's like, no, I'm just Kirby. There's a certain, like, molester out there for me, kind of.

It's just like, it's so good.

Brad: 00:06:38

It's. It's really incredible. And it's like, I. It's like jokes per. Per time, per unit of time is like off the chart. Like, it's just non stop jokes.

And it's one of those shows. It's like every line is a joke. And I'm just. That, to me, is just so impressive.

Conor: 00:06:53

So I'm becoming a parent now. I'm like, I relate so strongly to Bob now.

Brad: 00:06:58

Oh, yeah.

Conor: 00:06:59

Just like my son constantly just doing, like, the most ridiculous things. I'm just like, oh, gosh.

Brad: 00:07:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. Well, just one more thing that we have in common then.

Conor: 00:07:13

That's awesome.

Brad: 00:07:14

All right, well, I'll bring us in and we can start. Connor, thank you for taking the time here today. Join the show. How are you doing today?

Conor: 00:07:23

No worries. Pretty good. We were just talking about weather before and it's actually sunny here for once, so I'm really happy about that. So I am getting blown.

Brad: 00:07:32

Well, I mean, it's like end of February, so it's like, it's bound to start turning soon. That's my thought. And it's sunny here too, in Belgium, which is like. Like a miracle. So. Yeah, we picked a good day.

Yeah, I wanted to start because, you know, I spoke with you before probably it was about a little over a year now about a paper that you did. I wrote an article about it. And so I want to talk about nanomaterials.

I want to talk about sustainable Chemistry and space, sustainable space exploration, all of these things. But I wanted to start with maybe you could give us the definition of.

Brad: 00:08:08

What it is that you do.

Brad: 00:08:10

Because to me it feels like there's like engineering, there's material science, there's chemistry, all of these things kind of floating around. So if you had a label, if you had to label yourself, the work that you do, the research that you're interested in, what would you call it?

Conor: 00:08:26

To be honest, I wouldn't even know. I don't even consider myself a scientist. I think I'm more like an observer of kind of the world kind of.

Because a lot of our ideas just comes from just. Just looking around and then kind of like seeing something in the news or, you know, seeing something on telly.

Like we had a paper out on like load stuff about seaweed, but I originally saw that Master Chef during lockdown. So I mean, it's just like I just had an idea. It's just like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

I mean, I would just say generally just a material scientist. I guess because material science is such a broad area, it does encompass kind of entirely stem that it's kind of like it is.

Engineering has a little bit of science has some of like, you know, computer science associated with it as well. So I mean, generally I would just think that I'm just a material scientist.

But yeah, we do a lot of different kind of things, a lot of different applications associated with their work, but mainly it is just around nanomaterials or, you know, sustainable polymers and stuff like that.

Brad: 00:09:26

Okay, so we'll get into maybe some of those definitions of what those things are in a second. But I'm. Material science was something that, yeah, like I had never really heard of. I studied biology.

So, you know, I did the, you know, I did physics, I did chemistry, I did biology courses and stuff like that. Engineering to me was always kind of like, okay, that's a very applied thing. You know, they're doing kind of math and you know, structural stuff.

But when I started doing science writing, science journalism, I found myself writing a lot about chemistry and material science. Which chemistry. I almost like, I almost failed that course many times in university.

Conor: 00:10:03

I knew in awe because I couldn't do. I'm dyslexic, so I could not do biology. The names are too long. All I remember is the kingdom Bylam class Order, family, genus, species.

That's the only thing I remember from biology. I was terrible at it.

Brad: 00:10:16

Well, I think it's because biology is. It is a lot of Memorization. Like, it's a lot of reading and just memorizing.

Okay, well, this thing does this, you know, like, this part of the cell does this thing or. Yeah, the classification of animals and stuff.

Whereas the other scient sciences, there is a bit of, like, if you can solve an equation, you know, then you can. You can kind of do it all sort of thing. Right. Whereas that was like, I'm. I would consider myself dyslexic with math.

You know, I would do these long algebra problems, and at the end I'd be like, I don't know where I made this mistake, but somewhere I, you know, flipped a six for a nine or something, you know, something like this. So biology was always me, because I was like, I can read it, I can memorize it, I can understand it. That's it. There we go.

But I was surprised to find myself covering sort of material science and chemistry and this kind of thing. But it really feels like it's. I don't know, maybe you wouldn't say like an emerging field because it's kind of been around for a while.

But we are at a stage, it feels like, with a lot of technology, that since we've unlocked some things about some of these materials, we've been able to make a lot of technological advances. You know, whether it's batteries, you know, different minerals that we're using.

I mean, even smartphones, like the touch screens, all of these things are being unlocked, but it's because of the materials.

Brad: 00:11:34

Right?

Brad: 00:11:35

So that, to me, is kind of this interesting thing.

And so that's what I view material science is like looking at the things that we have available to build with or to use, and then how do we use those things in new and interesting ways?

Conor: 00:11:48

Yeah, I mean, like, I can't agree more that it's just kind of like just how technology progresses. Because, I mean, if you just look at, like, the airplanes, it was like they invented the airplane.

Then about 20, 30 years later, there was airplanes and war, and then they were commercialized that you could fly in them. And then 20, 30 years later, we were then trying to go up into space. Like, it's just.

I think just kind of just the way that we've rapidly progressed as a society is just absolutely insane because we're not that old. But, like, when we were kids, you didn't have cell phone. Like, that was just like science fiction.

But now what you can do with cell phones, it's just absolutely ridiculous. Like, it's amazing. But.

Yeah, no, I think, like, material science, it's just I think like what I always learned when I was kind of in college is like to kind of be successful in material science is that you could never be good at just one thing.

You need to understand chemistry, you need to understand physics, biology, maths of just all of it kind of encompassed together because it's just such a broad discipline, such a broad field. Just kind of just the applications, the materials are just. There's just a huge plethora of them. I mean, what just even kind of graphene?

I suppose the kind of quintessential nanomaterial that a lot of people know is that like, you know, that there's energy storage, you know, energy harvesting, so making new batteries, getting clean energy or hydrogen gas, should I say. And then kind of just even all the way to like really, really simple things like just taking graphene putting into a plastic and making it stronger.

So it's just like a wide range of applications going from something super simple to something very, very complex that's out there. And I think that's what's kind of like really interests people, I suppose, about the field. But no, you are right that it is. It's a young field.

I mean, I.

s. So I think about like: 2005

It's really not that long ago that we know we didn't have a lot of these materials around. And we're still kind of learning so much about them already. Just today, it's just simply kind of taking two graphenemerches.

People discover that if you just kind of just have them kind of slightly aligned, weird on top of each other, all of a sudden it becomes a superconductor. So it's just. That's something that we didn't know two years ago. And it's something that people just found through serendipity just by chance.

Now it's like opened up this whole new field of kind of just can we make superconductors out of graphene now? So it's just like, it's just a really, really interesting field that's just kind of sprawling across all of stem.

Brad: 00:14:32

s and then, you know, early: 2000

Yeah, but it makes sense. It kind of lines up, right? Like, that's when you start to see all cool things. So one more thing before we get into.

We'll use graphene, I think as an example we can go into of a nanomaterial. But the you you mentioned, you know, you consider yourself an observer of these, of the world. And I think, I mean, to me that is science, right?

Like you're looking at things, you're trying to figure things out or trying to see what's, what's useful.

But with the material science and the way that you, that, that, that, the way that you describe that there really kind of jumped out to me because we have all these materials that we already use. But then you're looking at them and trying to say, well, is there another.

Brad: 00:15:26

Way to use this?

Brad: 00:15:26

Or what happens if we put that material in this condition or something like that? So it really feels like rather than sort of this, I mean, I guess it's probably still hypothesis driven in a way, but it's kind of this.

I don't know, I'm reluctant to use the term mad science or alchemy, you know, kind of thing, but it really kind of is where it's like, well, here's a material, let's, you know, let's put extreme heat on it or, you know, maybe it'll do something weird if we, if we add this to it. And that's, there's something really kind of creative and interesting to me about that.

Conor: 00:15:59

I think there's just probably what a lot of people think about science is that like, a lot of people kind of go into the lab and they're like, they're inventing something like completely new. And that certainly is the case with, with some stuff.

But I mean, a lot of it is like, you know, iterations, but they're kind of like large steps and iterations of kind of the devices, like, I mean, unlike the transistors in our computers and stuff, is that, you know, we're kind of using silicon and all this, all these kind of materials everyone knows.

And then kind of then using nanomaterials, it's like a huge jump into, you know, this kind of new performance in these materials that are in kind of computing.

And it's just, you know, it doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like kind of like a big deal, but it's just kind of like when you kind of do it, everyone, all of A sudden kind of goes like, why didn't we kind of think of that before? Or something like that. I think it's just kind of one of those things. Yeah, it's like a lot of science isn't kind of just like all of a sudden just.

I'm just going. I'm going to go there, and I'm just going to invent a new rocket or something. It's just.

It is a lot of kind of iterary, kind of clever thinking of maybe how to redesign something that we already have, because, I mean, that also kind of facilitates these technologies.

Kind of helping us, you know, in the short term is that, you know, if you take something that we're already kind of commercializing, you just slightly improve it with, you know, something nano. It's just like its chances of meeting or getting to the market or meeting those standards of commercialization are much, much narrower.

And so, like, it's. It's so much closer. And I think that's kind of one of the big things that people always say is like, oh, graphene's the wonder material.

Like, when am I going to see it? I hear so much about it. And so there are little things of graphene kind of trickling out there.

And I think it's just people don't appreciate the fact that it's like, it doesn't have to be like this big boom of all of a sudden graphene technology, and everything's changed. It's these small things.

Like, I know that there's kind of capacitor systems out there in China that use graphene batteries and battery electrodes and all this kind of stuff. So it's like, it's out there, it's being used.

You know, they're integrating graphene into plastics, into the hulls of ships, into the hulls of cars, tennis rackets, helmets and stuff. So it's like it's slowly getting out there.

But I suppose it's just people expect, like, it's going to be something crazy, like, okay, we've got the graphene bot now, like a mechanical robot that's out there. And I was like, yeah, that's what we were expecting. But it's just like now these kind of things are. They trickle along.

I suppose it kind of maybe takes a little bit of the wonderment out of it or something, but it's just. Yeah, it's small little iterations, and then when we look back in time, we go like, wow, that was something that was kind of very important.

So I think it's just we have to like, remember that.

It's just like if we look back in hindsight of everything that we've kind of accomplished so far, it's absolutely crazy because, I mean, 10 years ago or whatever, 15 years ago, we only discovered graphene, but it's already now being commercialized and that's like huge. Like, that's so quick. I mean, I don't think you get FDA approval for a drug that you discovered 15 years ago.

Like, I mean, it'd probably take 30 years, 40 years or something like that. It would take forever. So. Yeah, yeah. It's just these things are kind of small and I mean. Yeah.

As I said, I suppose, like for me thinking that like kind of an observer, I suppose kind of the things that I look at to try and change, they're probably like a little bit more unusual. And I suppose that's what kind of makes them, I suppose a little bit more eye catching, I guess.

And you know, kind of these Martian materials that, you know, trying to take something that's kind of already on Mars and trying to use it to our advantage, I suppose that's kind of maybe unique. Unique take on it. Whereas we're more focused on how do we get everything over there and get the people over there.

It's like, well, what happens when we get there? Can we not use anything that's around us? And I suppose that was kind of our, our take on it.

That is just surely there's something advantageous up there. I mean, then why go there? It's just a rock. I mean, it's cool to say that we would be like a two species planet and all that kind of stuff.

And kind of a kudos to us, like a pat in the back that we've colonized was just like, we got to do something while we're up there. So.

Brad: 00:20:04

Well, that's. Yeah.

And there's lots of questions that we could do with space, like, you know, the different, you know, mining asteroids and like, who knows what kind of materials are out there, that kind of thing. But let's. We've kind of teased this now a little bit, you know, thrown this term around graphene and nanomaterials and stuff.

So let's break that down first because I was shocked when we first chatted about where graphene comes from and just this idea of nanomaterial.

So maybe you could define nanomaterial and use the example of, of graphene, where it comes from, how it's, how it's made and what makes it a nanomaterial and why nanomaterials are so interesting.

Conor: 00:20:45

Well, actually, there is actually a definition for nanomaterials. So it isn't kind of like a wishy washy thing that we kind of just go like, oh, that one's a nanoter. And I don't like this one.

So I'm not going to say it's a nanomaterial. So it's just that one of the dimensions of a material needs to be less than 100 nanometers. That's essentially it.

So it's just you imagine that you take like a block and if you just decrease maybe its height down to being 1nm or less than 100nm, then it would then technically be a nanomaterial. That's essentially what graphene is. Graphene is just a sheet, a very, very thin sheet of atoms. But yeah, it comes from graphite.

So graphite is like a deck of cards when you look at it under a microscope. But each one of those individual playing cards is a sheet of graphene.

And then we kind of then use chemistry and stuff to then break apart this deck of cards into the individualized sheets. And then we can then kind of play around with them and use them. Generally we do this in kind of liquids.

An issue when graphene was discovered is that people literally got tape, put it on top of graphite, and then started to just peel off the layers. And that was initially.

Brad: 00:21:56

Graphite is. Graphite is just like pencil lead, right?

Conor: 00:21:59

Yeah. So it's just essentially your pencil lead.

And we've shown as well, like in a paper that we did a couple of months ago, is that you can literally take pencil edge and you can turn it into graphene and really, really good graphing.

That's similar to the stuff that you make from going to a commercial supplier, specifically buying graphite that's been milled up and everything to then use in labs is that you can take any old graphite and then turn it into this kind of wondrous material.

Brad: 00:22:30

Right.

Brad: 00:22:31

So then. So you got. So to make a nano material, it's got to be really thin and. And it's usually these thin sheets. That's how we think of it. Right.

Conor: 00:22:38

Is like, yeah, so we have these.

Brad: 00:22:39

Thin sheets of nano sheets.

Conor: 00:22:40

And then also you can have kind of tubular shapes is that, you know, you kind of decrease another dimension. They essentially make this elongated array of atoms is one of kind of the other forms of, of graphene as well.

You can take a graphene sheet and essentially have it rolled up to form a tube. That's the carbon Nanotube, a carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet just rolled up.

Or a graphene sheet is a deep bundled or kind of a unscrolled nanotube material. So they're just all what we'd call in chemistry, like allotropes of carbon. It's just the different forms in which carbon kind of form together.

But, you know, graphene isn't kind of the only nanomaterial out there or the only atom that kind of. Or element that forms. And nanometers, you have a whole zoo of them.

So we have, you know, boron nitride, which is boron and nitrogen atoms, similar to graphene. It just kind of just sits in a sheet, and it's a. It's an electrical insulator.

And you have something called molybdenum disulfide, which is molybdenum and sulfur atoms, again in this kind of just planar sheet form. And then that's a semiconductor right there. You have kind of the basis of.

Kind of your basic computing is you have graphene, a conductor, you have a semiconductor, and then you have an insulator. And then that's where you can go and kind of start making electronic devices then.

Brad: 00:24:02

So then when you break, you got graphite, which is boring pencil lead, you put it into this graphene form, this net, this really thin thing, and it gets, like, new properties or enhanced properties. How would you describe that?

Conor: 00:24:19

And we would say that it kind of like. Yeah, that it, like, enhances it. It optimizes the properties.

And which is why, kind of why nanomaterials are so exciting is that if you look at graphite, we all know from kind of with a pencil, you're writing and it's very brittle. You're constantly having to sharpen it, so it's not very, very strong. And then also. Then if you take graphite, it's not a very.

It conducts electricity, but it's not an amazing conductor of electricity.

But when you then optimize it by breaking it apart into the graphene nanosheets, graphene is one of the strongest materials that we know because it's based on trying to break molecular bonds in the actual sheet rather than with graphite. It's all these sheets sitting on top of each other.

So when you start to then try and pull it apart, it's just the sheets coming apart rather than actually pulling the actual graphene sheets. And then also as well, graphene is an amazing conductor of electricity and heat because it's just this single sheet.

So the electrons can Just zoom across the surface. Rather than in graphite. It's all this model, the amorphous structures, all the sheets are all crumpled up and they're all smushed together.

So go from A to B across the graphite. It's going to go like up and down and, oh, I have to go backwards and forwards and everything.

So, yeah, it's just, it's essentially, it's just optimizing the properties.

When you, what we would say, exfoliate these kind of layered materials down to their kind of nano form, and it's the same with, you know, molybdenum disulfide as well, is that when you kind of start to strip away its layers and get down to the single layers, you actually are able to kind of tune the band gap of the material as well and tune its properties to make it more advantageous for electronics. Because in the bulk as well, molybdenum disulfide, it isn't used for anything in electronics.

It's actually just used for a lubricant most of the time. And it's actually a very, very good mechanical or solid state lubricant.

So you literally just get the rock and you kind of rub it around the joint and all the layers come off and they just form this kind of slippy layer that you then kind of just put two metals together and they'll be able to form some type of actuation. We kind of have the mechanical gears going.

So essentially you're just discovering all these amazing properties from these materials by just kind of turning them into nano.

And it's the same with, you know, looping around to our Mars study as well, is that we just took kind of boring rocks that people more or less assumed had, you know, not very interesting properties.

And when we exfoliated them down to then kind of their nanoform or into these kind of nano rods, is that we found that they actually turned into semiconducting materials and they have these very interesting properties and they could, you know, have clean energy harvesting and, you know, we could use them to kind of reinforced polymers. So it's just like this is what's kind of very exciting about nanoscience is that it's like that unknown.

It does seem like a little bit, I suppose, when I say it kind of repetitive because you can just keep on going, well, let's just get that material and try and see if we can turn it into a nano sheet or a nanotube. And let's get that one, and let's get that one.

But the thing is that it is cutting edge science because we simply don't know what's going to happen to these materials when they go down to the nanoscale. And that's when all those kind of crazy properties come out.

Brad: 00:27:23

Okay, so that was kind of what one of the other questions I had was, you know, can you sort of predict what material, when broken down to a nano level, will make. Will have interesting properties? But before I get there, it's like, do all the nanomaterials.

Is it all just about sort of stripping away the sort of resistance is maybe the wrong word or the clutter. Right.

And so when you get down to, like those sort of atom level, you know, thin, thinness, you just, like you said, electrons can move much faster, it's stronger, because you're actually trying to break the bonds and not just this brittle layer of stuff. So is it really just like, is that sort of the core of what makes nanomaterials or is there other sort of.

Sometimes I think about it, it could be way off that it's like, you know, when you get down to the quantum level of things, like, there's this. This weirdness that we don't understand. So there's something that we don't.

Conor: 00:28:18

It's the quote. Yeah.

It's a lot of the quantum effects that start to kind of come into a play when to go down to those very, very small dimensions and you start to have these. All these kind of funky effects that occur. I won't go into. Because I don't want to go into like a huge amount of kind of physics stuff.

But I mean, like. Yeah, that a lot of it is to do the. Going down to these kind of quantum levels.

When you start, essentially, you almost have like a macroscopic material that's then being confined down into these kind of quantum realms, and it's that kind of combination. You kind of get these really, really interesting properties.

But to go to your point of kind of being like, oh, can we kind of predict what, you know, a material might do is that not all materials can kind of be broken down into some type of, I suppose, nanomaterial, like, I mean, for kind of bricks and mortar and things like that, like, they won't necessarily form some type of, you know, structure like graphing, like a sheet or that they won't form, you know, these kind of nice tubular shapes or anything. Nothing kind of uniform.

So it has to kind of really depend on kind of the actual physical structure and the lattice makeup and material to use kind of a physics where like, how the atoms kind of arrange together for us to be able to kind of go, like, you could.

You can see physically where you can kind of strip down the materials, because, I mean, going back to graphite is that you can see the layers in graphite. You kind of see, okay, so this is what's going to happen when we try and use these exfoliation regimes.

It's going to peel off these layers, we're going to get some thick layers, and we keep on this peeling process.

Eventually we're going to get down to a single layer, and then if we keep going, we're going to then start to tear up these kind of smaller layers and, you know, being able to kind of control size and stuff. But, yeah, it seems like for some materials, it seems like people are very good at kind of predicting the properties.

I suppose that there's a lot of, like, for molybdenum, disulfide, it's kind of in a family of materials called tmd.

So it's basically just like removing molybdenum and they can kind of replacing with maybe like tungsten or something, or removing sulfur and then replacing with nitrogen or something, you're kind of removing atoms. So they all have like, roughly the same shape.

And because you know so well about one material, you can kind of, through analogy, be able to use computations to predict the properties of other materials.

But then if you kind of have materials that you don't know a lot about, when people do the computational stuff, this is where you can kind of get this kind of mismatch between experiments and then actual experimenting and theory, essentially.

And this is what we kind of saw with a lot of our materials, is that we worked with physical rocks in another study called filiosilicates, but they're. They're like micas, essentially, like these kind of generic, flaky little rocks. And they're commonly believed to be just like clay or.

Or all these other types of kind of flaky materials is that they're insulating, they're not very strong, and essentially they're boring and they're not interesting at all. And people have kind of done some computational studies about stripping them down to their.

Their single layers, and they go, oh, they're even more boring. Nothing happens. Nothing. Nothing changes with the properties.

But there was this one study where they just by accident decided to strip them down and try and look at their electronic properties.

And what they found out is that these kind of mica materials and these filial silicates, they have this Huge variability in their electronic properties. No other nanomaterial has. But everyone just wanted to ignore them because they were just like, no, the computational stuff says that they're crap.

So it's just. It was just one of the things that, like, oh, maybe they did something wrong in their study and all this kind of stuff.

And I was just like, no, these are good researchers. They clearly are onto something. So what we did is that we took a bunch of them, we exfoliated them all down. We saw exactly what the other people saw.

They had these massive, tunable electronic properties.

And we were able to kind of figure out through kind of modeling and stuff why people, when they were initially looking at them computationally, why they were seeing the wrong data.

And this is where you can kind of see this kind of mismatch with the theory in the experiment, is that you really need the experiment to back up the theory. And sometimes you kind of have people that just go, theory says no, so let's all just ignore it. So it's just like, yeah, it is.

It is actually surprisingly difficult to predict the properties of the materials. I was definitely, before we did the study, under the opinion of, well, like, the computational people, like, they're the. They're actual nerds.

Like, they're proper nerds. So they definitely know what they're talking about more so than me, who doesn't even think I'm a proper scientist.

So I was just like, I'm just going to believe what they say, but it's just like, no, like, these people, like, they did experiments. They can't be wrong. All the experiments look right. It's been peer reviewed. It went into a good journal. So it's like, they have to be onto something.

And, yeah, when we looked into it, it's just like it was the first case that it actually seemed like, oh, maybe the nerds don't always know what's going on all the time. But, yeah, it was. Yeah, yeah, it led into them.

What we did with the Mars stuff is that essentially people thought similarly, oh, you know, gypsum, you know, it's not a very exciting material. We've investigated it computationally and, you know, it doesn't seem to have exciting properties.

But again, we decided to just kind of push the envelope and kind of see, like, you know, what can these rocks do?

Brad: 00:33:36

Yeah, that's interesting. And, yeah, it's like the modeling, the theory, like, when it. When it works.

In the example that you gave before, I can't remember, you know, with tungsten and, like, flipping those things out Then it makes sense, right, that it's like, okay, we know something about this material. The atoms that were, you know, the elements that we're putting in there are similar. So it all tracks, right?

But then there's still this sort of mystery level where it's like it says, no, but if you test it, you never know, there might actually be something in there. And that's where that, that mystery level is still.

That to me is so fascinating because not only is like nanomaterials itself this brand new thing, but then you get down to this. Well, why this one?

You know, all the nanomaterials, like, we get this idea, sheet tubes, it's going to, it's going to work, it's going to be this interesting thing. But then we have this obscure material that shouldn't work based on all of those things that we just discussed, but it does.

Conor: 00:34:31

You're actually describing the history of nanomaterials. Because the thing is that people said that graphene couldn't exist.

The computational people said that graphene, physically, thermodynamically, everything looking at backwards, forwards, it could never exist. If you made a single sheet of graphene, it would instantaneously crumble in on itself like that. It should be completely unstable.

And it wasn't until the lads in Manchester isolated it that everyone just went, oh, yeah, I guess they were wrong.

So it's just, it is kind of one of those things that it's just like those, those kind of like computational assumptions actually nearly like stunted the nanoscience, you know, revolution, I guess, or kind of the field is that if people believe that, it's just like, okay, maybe the computation people are right, let's not bother exploring graphene at all. Then it's just like we wouldn't be where we are today, right?

Brad: 00:35:25

So it's like, yeah, don't always trust the modeling nerds. But do we, do we, do we know then where the flaw in the model was?

Conor: 00:35:35

I think it's just always with kind of modeling is that it's just like, it is only as good as the experimental data. And I think it's just like if it doesn't match the experimental data, then you need to adjust the modeling.

If the experimental data, there's no obvious flaws with that. So it's just like, I think it was just one of those things that I think the data wasn't there.

So then there was just, I guess the need for modifying the data was just, I don't know, I guess it kind of seemed like maybe just it Wasn't There wasn't any points.

Brad: 00:36:06

Right, Right. Yeah.

It's kind of a weird, like really sort of probably like technical question, but it just seems like one of those things is like, yeah, if all the theory. Again, it kind of makes me think of that quantum stuff, right, where it's like all the.

All the equations say one thing, but when you get down to this, this thinness, this realm, it's like the rules change.

Conor: 00:36:26

It actually isn't that. It wasn't that actually difficult or even kind of technical.

All it had to do was the fact that the theory stuff didn't compensate for the size of the materials. That was. It is that with the materials, their electronic properties were actually not only dependent on their.

The number of layers you have, but also the size. So when they started to get really, really small, they started to look like insulators again. So they started to look like they're bulk materials.

And all the computational models can only assume small nanosheets. So that. That's where we saw the discrepancy is that because they assumed that they were always.

Or they could only model them being small, that they always had these effects that made the band gaps appear large. Whereas because we could do it experimentally, you could control the size.

We saw that as you change the size, the actual aerial size of nanosheets, that also changed the band gap size. That was. It turned out to kind of just be something very simple. But it's just the fact that just no one looked at it and it's always.

It can always turn out to be something just as simple as that. It's just. It was just literally just. They just weren't thinking about the actual size.

They were looking at the layers, but they just weren't looking at the actual size you could actually get. And that's why the initial people, they got all these fantastical results. Because when they were making their nanosheets, they're a massive.

They're absolutely huge. And they were able to get them so thin. And that's why they were able to get these fantastic electronic properties.

But yeah, it's like when other people did the modeling, they were like, no, we don't see this at all. And it's like you need to think about. Their nanosheets were huge. Yours, you're assuming, very small. So that was literally it.

It was as simple as that.

Brad: 00:38:03

This is like, okay, so a bit of, a.

Bit of an aside, but this is something that I talk about a lot is like, you know, this, this need for the argument or the case for basic research, right? And like this feels like one of those things where it's like if you don't, if someone doesn't just try it or like ask the question, right?

You could do all the, the models could say all this stuff and so you might. But if someone, until someone just actually does it, you don't know.

And I think that that's, you know, I'm going to make a point again here for like this is why you do basic research, right? This is why you read somebody's paper and you say, oh, they did that. Interesting. What if we try it this way? Or something like that.

And I feel like there's so many, you know, you got the, you know, the politicians and the public that are like, well, why are we funding all this stuff, right? So there's a lack of understanding there. But then even just in the, within the science community, people get so siloed, right?

They get so focused on their one thing that they don't sort of, you know, look to other fields and see how, you know, serendipitous discoveries or cross pollination of knowledge, you know, all that kind of stuff goes on. I just, maybe you, maybe you have a thought on this.

But this is something that I think about a lot as like science, computer communication because we often scientists think about, wow, we got to communicate to the public and we got to justify what we do. So this is a good justification for that.

But there's also this interdisciplinary communication that I feel is lacking and you probably would lose some of these interesting discoveries or someone's going to take what you found and do something interesting with it.

Conor: 00:39:35

I think a lot of it is just probably the kind of the mentality and in academia that it's just, I think when people kind of feel that someone's like, has a question about their work, I think it's always kind of like interpreted as being kind of negative or you kind of need to feel like defensive. I need to kind of justify my work. I think. Yeah, a lot of that kind of conversational aspect of academia kind of goes.

It's just kind of just gone away. I'm not sure if it was ever there.

I think it might have to do with just kind of just the modes in which we, we publish is that, you know, you have anonymous reviewers and you know, they can sometimes be very critical or negative and you know, sometimes rightfully so, sometimes just overly critical for, I don't know, their competitor or something.

And I think it's just, I don't know it's just a negative mentality because I mean, when I kind of like think of things is that like people always go like, oh, you know, like an industry person or something, like, who's your biggest competitor? I just, I don't see research like that and I don't think people should like, I'm not trying to compete against someone to do something.

It's just like everyone is potentially collaborators. It's just like there's someone else working on something just like I am. They're working the same thing.

I'd rather reach out to them and be like, what are you doing? We're doing this. And it's just like, you know, we're getting this wrong and I see you're getting this right. Like we could work together on this.

Like, I see like there's more benefit to that than kind of just being like, oh, I don't like you because you do the same thing as me, so you're a competitor and I'm never going to talk to you. It's just like, but that person could be an extra expert in the field and it's just like you're missing out on this. Yeah.

As you said, cross pollination, this knowledge, just kind of expansion that's just like, this is how we'll get to this like next technological era. It's just like we need to stop being so damn competitive.

Brad: 00:41:22

Yeah. Well, in a way though, I understand, you know, that there's like competition for grants.

Conor: 00:41:27

Right.

Brad: 00:41:28

There's only so much grant money to go around. But I wonder, do you feel that maybe in, in this area, do you find that it's really collaborative?

Because I could also see, you know, proprietary, you know, commercialization of some of these things coming into where people then want to be more guarded about what they're doing.

Conor: 00:41:48

I think, I think with regards to kind of like thinking about commercialization, it's definitely always kind of like the universities, the universities are always very aware of kind of what might be like sexy IP and stuff.

So they're, I think the universities are, I like, there are definitely kind of researchers that are very forward facing with regards to kind of industry. Like, I mean, I consider myself that as like, I definitely would love to have research that culminates in something that's useful.

But I mean like odds are and like, I'm not going to like lie to myself is that like most research and probably most of my research may not come to fruition, but it's just like, you know, if you have that ability to kind of have research that will influence policy or be able to kind of influence others to maybe go over the edge? I mean, I think that's just as satisfying.

But yeah, it's just, I think, yeah, a lot of the gear towards kind of protecting IP can come from, you know, just the setups within countries and setups within universities.

Like I know the, the States is that a lot of the universities is that when they look at funding, it's what's the dollar value that you get back from the funding, which is always a huge thing I know in the States is that you're going to pay for you to do this research, but how are we going to make money back on this investment? Whereas in Europe it's a little bit more lax.

Is that there is, I wouldn't say exactly kind of fundamental research, but they are more willing to understand that grassroots research needs to occur in order for that to kind of reach momentum to get to commercialization.

There is still that want for commercialization, but I think, think the, the push is getting there, but I think it's not as extreme in kind of other countries. But yeah, the only analogy they can kind of think of is obviously the powerhouse that is the United States.

And I know that a lot of their research and a lot of the professors are under stress or duress of being like, I need to come up with something that's going to make money. And I think that that can be kind of, that can lead to that kind of competitive inward thinking of just being like, I can't tell anyone about this.

I need to thinking about myself and all this kind of stuff. And yeah, as you said, people want to get the grant money to be able to do this.

And I think unfortunately in those situations you will then have to be selfish, I guess.

Brad: 00:44:03

Yeah.

Yeah, it just, yeah, it feels a little, it feels like sometimes the especially like from even the funding, the people providing the funding, which I guess goes up to government and politicians that maybe don't understand that, like without that foundation of just basic research coming up with, you know, ideas or bits of information, bits of knowledge, that then that's what slowly builds towards the breakthrough technology.

Brad: 00:44:29

It's, it's.

Brad: 00:44:29

But, and you see, I see it a lot in doing science journalism, right, is because it's like even, you know, a lot of websites or magazines that you write for, they want you to, to, to report on what this is going to mean.

Conor: 00:44:45

Yeah.

Brad: 00:44:46

What, what detect.

So you have so many times this sentence in an article that's like this thing might one day lead to this treatment or you know, like somebody studying, you know, grasshoppers was an example that came up in another podcast where it's like, you know, they're studying the way grasshoppers jump or something like this, and it's like, oh, this might make a robot one day. Like, we could make jumping robots. It's like, that's never gonna happen. Like, it's, like it's not, it's not useful.

But like, everybody's trained to have this economic, you know, sort of commercial justification for what it is they do rather than, well, I'm creating knowledge. And we don't know whether that's going to be useful.

But I think, I think you can philosophically make the case that more knowledge is, is itself valuable.

Conor: 00:45:33

It's that saying that I'm like, literally Everett repeats more about was Einstein or something, that we stand on the shoulders of giants, that it's just, you know, it's just, it's this little information that we, we need this accumulation of information before we get this big jump. And I mean, I think that's the case in pretty much, like, all industries. So, yeah, I think it is just, I would say it's kind of, like, disappointing.

But, yeah, I, I, I, I think that's where kind of the, the pressure does kind of come on that it's just, you know, what, what value would this kind of come, and I can understand kind of the public's feeling of it as well, is that, you know, when they do read an article, they want, they do want to know, like, what's the outcome. I suppose it's like it has to be almost like a story that it's the beginning, the middle, and what's the end.

And there's going to be this proposed technology. So, and, you know, it's, it's public funding as well.

So I can kind of understand people as well, wanting to know what's going to come of this research that they hear so highly of. But, yeah, it is, but I think.

Brad: 00:46:35

That that's actually, yeah, I think from the public standpoint, I think that might be a bit of a myth that they, that they care. Because the one thing that's like. And again, this came up in another podcast I did.

It's like the biggest topics, and I see this, again, as a science journalist, some of the most popular topics that the public let's, you know, air quotes, this general public are fascinated with is like, astrophysics, you know, which impacts their life. Not at all, you know, but an article that's about, like, a new theory of time will Say that like, maybe time doesn't exist, Right.

That's not going to impact your life in any way. But these are the ones that, like, people love, right. And it's like, I don't know, can't. It can't explain it.

People are just fascinated by that culture.

Conor: 00:47:26

It's kind of like, you know, we have kind of trickled through this kind of science fiction and everything is kind of trickled into society. And I think it's just kind of just like, I suppose the exciting. Yeah.

The excitement around kind of like the unknown implications of these kind of things.

Because I, I myself as well, when you kind of see all these things like, oh, time dilations around the corner and all these kind of mad things is that. But yeah, it's just kind of like, it's that what ifs that kind of come up that I think is. That are kind of very exciting.

And I suppose that's like the thing with like, space travel as well, is that it's just like it's. Yeah, it's. It's not the idea.

I think that people are always like, oh, you know, like, oh, the technology to get there, it's to get there and then like, what happened? Like, what. What will it be like there? And I think that's what kind of really excites people with those kind of things that's like that.

I suppose, like, it sounds ridiculous, but they almost do feel like things that could be more effective on your life or could have large effects in your life, even though, as we said, you're gonna have absolutely nothing. But it's just like, what happens. I'm just walking down the road to get donuts and then all of a sudden I step into a wormhole or something.

I think it's just like that fantasy of just being like, oh, no, I'm falling through time. But I read about this in this article by Bradley.

Brad: 00:48:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's like, it's. It's interesting because it's like we have this. You know, there's. There is this.

There's this evidence that people are just fascinated by the unknown and that, you know, and like, that's. I think you can go through history, right? Like, this is why people have explored all the different. You know, there's something about humans being.

But yet in science and science community where we kind of go away from that and be like, no, we have to justify dollars and cents as to why it is. It's like, yeah, maybe sometimes just lean into the, like, the wonder of it all.

Conor: 00:49:13

Right.

Brad: 00:49:13

Because that's, I think that's why most people who are in science get into science and then that can also get kind of beaten out of you a little bit. But let's go to the space stuff because I want to cover this before we run out of time.

Because this was, yeah, really interesting to me because it blends kind of two ideas. There's the space exploration, the space travel which we just touched on. Interesting just for the sake of being interesting.

Humans were these explorers. But there's this sustainability angle to it which you have kind of a philosophy in your work.

If I'll paraphrase what I'm thinking, then you can tell me if I'm correct or not. But when it comes to let's say making nanomaterials and using nanomaterials, can we.

Making them in a way that's not harmful to the environment is in itself valuable.

But then being able to do make the nanomaterials with, without like a lot of complex, you know, machinery or solvents or you know, chemicals, these kind of things means that hypothetically someone that's on Mars with limited, you know, resources because they've, you can only bring so much in your spaceship might be able to fashion some of these very useful materials using very little. I've kind of thrown it all out there. Maybe you can kind of streamline that a little bit.

But I love the sustainability angle just for the sake of the planet. And then also it will make things easier when you're in space.

Conor: 00:50:50

I mean the thing is that like people are going to like laugh, but it's just like I truly feel that like the type of nanoscience that like my group does and the kind of, some of the people I collaborate with, like anyone can do it, like literally. I don't think you need any background.

You could go into the lab, you can start making like graphene like immediately because it's just that it is such a simple process that we use. There was a, it's called liquid exfoliation.

And it's a process that was pioneered like actually here in Ireland in Trinity College by Jonathan Coleman, who I did my PhD with.

So that's why I do it this way is that it's just like, it's just, it's such intrinsically simple process that it's just, you take essentially the bulk material, you put it into a liquid and just apply some type of energy to it. So generally it'd be like sound and it's literally just the high pitched sound that goes into the liquid.

And it kind of just bursts, bursts into the liquid and kind of breaks apart the material. Or you can use these little sonic bats that do the exact same thing, just at a lower frequency.

And they're actually things that are used in jewelers to clean jewelry and that you'd actually see around. I think you can even buy them on Amazon as well. Or you can even use just mixing.

So you just put the stuff into a blender, shear it up, and that creates enough energy as well to kind of break them apart.

So it's just, it's such a simple process because all of it just implies putting this in a liquid and then pressing a button and then waiting a couple of hours. And I think that's, as you said, like, that's kind of the beauty of it all is that, like, anyone could do this.

And I think this is what leads to it being so easily applied elsewhere, is that you don't need this special expertise and you don't need these special instruments. As you can use a kitchen blender to make graphene. We've done a little paper on it. Jonathan Coleman had done a paper on it as well.

Loads of other people demonstrated.

You just, you can just get a Kenwood blender and just stick it all together, just use fairy liquid and tap water and then, boom, you can make graphene yourself at home. So I think, like, yeah, you have summarized it well.

And I think for us and for me as well, so, like, I think it's just, it's not a principle of kind of doing no harm, is that you can't like, make a device or make a material that says it's going to help, you know, it's going to help us as a society. But then in turn, when you make it, it's actually going to damage our health, essentially.

Brad: 00:53:06

Yeah.

Conor: 00:53:06

Because then you can't use like all these, like, mad solvents and everything because they have to go somewhere and then who's that going to affect? It's going to infect the environment. It's going to affect our wildlife, the plants, us, our soils, everything. We're going to be poisoning ourselves.

And I think that, like, I've really kind of just had that kind of culmination years ago, or that's, that's kind of idea instilled when we had a paper come out in science, which is like, you know, the holy grail of kind of publishing. Yeah, but it's just, it was. It was called G Putty, as putty is grafting putty.

So it was essentially, it was play doh our kids silly putty stuff that we put graphene into that I made in the lab. But what did it require?

It required nmp, which is a toxic industrial solvent used to strip metals and polymers, use chloroform, which everyone can know is completely toxic. And then we use like, ipa, not so bad. It's a rubbing alcohol. But we use like, this pleasure of solvents to make this material. And it just.

After a while, I actually hated that paper because the fact is that we made this material that's supposed to be this health sensor that was supposed to maybe potentially kind of leapfrog into industry and kind of help people have a different scope or a different idea of how to make these types of kind of nanomaterial sensors. But I was just like, we use all this terrible crap to make it.

So you're essentially making a sensor that's then going to inadvertently make you sick because of the processes and the industrial processes that would be required to make it. And that was kind of the turning point for me.

That was just like, it's so counterintuitive and it's so disingenuous to be like, I make health sensors, and by the way, I make them in a way that's going to kill me in the lab, essentially.

Brad: 00:54:43

So it's just like I make them in the most unhealthy way, essentially, that.

Conor: 00:54:47

It'S just like, this is going to like, absolutely tell you everything about your health and at the same time could possibly reach into your skin and then make that health so much worse. So you might need to buy more of the sensors.

Brad: 00:54:59

Yeah, yeah.

Conor: 00:55:00

That's where kind of like it started to kind of settle into that. I was just saying, like, I'd rather do something like that is kind of. That's gonna do no harm than. Yeah. Like, just do any research at all.

I think also kind of like we're talking before about kind of like being parents and kids and stuff.

And I think that really kind of like becoming like a parent kind of really kind of settled in as well, that it's just like, I don't want to kind of contribute to this kind of poisoning of the earth and then leave it to my kids to be like, well, sorry about that. It's just like, I'd rather at least have some type of small effect or know that I wasn't someone that kind of contributed.

And I mean, like, I don't know, hopefully, like, other people that do similar research might kind of buy into this kind of idea of, you know, let's stop Using solvents. Let's start trying to holistically think about how we kind of make our devices. I, I would love that.

And then, like, I think, as I said before, is that like, I'm under no illusion that like, my research may or may not kind of have large effects in industry and the technology.

But if that was the one effect that I had on other researchers of just let's really take sustainability seriously, I think I would say that that's kind of like a career accomplishment. Even though I've only just started my career. If that's the one takeaway that people took from it, I think that that was great.

Yeah, it's just our, the whole idea of our research was this whole, kind of, just this economical, feasible, like how could you feasibly do this way of kind of using and applying nanomaterials on Mars?

And we thought, what better way than having something that was already on Mars, that was using resources on Mars to be able to kind of, you know, help these potential or help this kind of potential society. But I mean, it's certainly not kind of like the only way that I envision nanomaterials kind of, you know, affecting space travel.

Because, I mean, I don't know, people may poo, poo kind of, you know, the research that we had done.

But, you know, there's other kind of ways in which nanomaterials can help, which is just the simple things of incorporating into the halls of, of spacecrafts or into, you know, the suits of astronauts is that, you know, their graphene, for example, is really, really good at reflecting electromechanical or electromagnetism and all this kind of stuff and radio waves and radiation and all this kind of stuff. So it'd be very good at shielding, increasing the properties and the mechanical stiffnesses and heat resistances of all these materials.

So I think, like, there's really kind of, I can see nanomaterials really kind of affecting space travel in some way, 100%, whether it's going to be our way, I would love it. But you know, like, who knows?

But I mean, nonetheless, I thought it was kind of an interesting study, and I think it was just kind of an interesting case study for people just being like, let's think about this economically and let's not mess up another planet, please.

Brad: 00:57:50

Yeah, and that's what I, that's what I really liked about it because I had written some things before about green chemistry, about the movement of green chemistry, which is getting, is now probably like 20, 30 years old, sort of this idea that the way that we do that we make things in chemistry, chemicals, and all of these different things. They were back when we invented these processes. We didn't care about all the toxic materials that were required to make these things.

Didn't think about it, didn't care all of those things.

And now there's like, this new way of thinking, a new challenge of, like, well, let's make those same things or even better things without using all of this horrible stuff. Yeah, and that's, you know, and that's as you described. You know, there's a. There's a.

There's a moral reason for doing that, not destroying the planet and all that. But when you do that, when you view things in that way, you actually unlock a lot of other possibilities.

And this Mars study that we've kind of alluded to here is you guys really said, okay, well, we have gypsum, which is potentially a boring rock, but let's see if we can make nanomaterials out of it. Nanotubes, I believe, in a way. Like, again, put these constraints on for environmental reasons. But also hypothetically, what could a Mars.

Like an early Mars base colony kind of thing. What might they have where they could make this, they could produce this material on Mars that they could then use. And it was like, what?

Like, you need water. Gypsum's already there on Mars. You need. You need water and you need. I don't know. You could tell me the ingredients.

Conor: 00:59:26

But essentially what the gypsum could be used from is that NASA had a study where they were taking gypsum. Gypsum contains or absorbs a lot of water and holds a lot of water.

And they were just proposing that essentially you take the gypsum from Mars, you would then dehydrate it. You take the water out, and you're kind of left with like, junk, essentially, stuff.

Stuff that can kind of be thrown away or doesn't really have any use. And it's called an hydride. So hence the name is just a dehydrated form of the original material, gypsum.

But what we found is that you could take the anhydrite materials and you can kind of break them apart into these kind of nano rods and these kind of nano tubular shapes. And you could then use them into kind of plastics.

You could put them into networks, electrochemical electrodes to produce hydrogen gas, so clean fuel on Mars. And then you could also then use them as like, you know, simple electronic materials.

Essentially, they were like a surge protector, is that they Would kind of, they could protect electronics and stuff like that from, you know, power outages and stuff. Some power outages.

But yeah, we use these restraints of, you know, taking this raw material and you could then mix it in water to be able to make these, these nanorods. And thing is that you're already making water from the dehydration process. So essentially you already have the water there.

So that's already kind of two of the things done. All you need is some type of blender. I'm sure they eat, they're going to eat on Mars.

So I mean, they would have some type of kind of mixing instruments I know that they do use. So we call them sonic probes. This is the thing I was saying about the sonication breaking apart nanomaterials.

They're also called like homogenizers as kind of, I guess an industrial term. And they're used a lot in kind of generic experiments for mixing and also kind of some biology experiments.

I know as well, and I know that that's something that they're interested in on Mars of kind of like you're going to be growing plants, you're going to then need to be able to assess the quality of life of the plants. And you would actually use a homogenizer, kind of break up bits of the plant to be able to kind of.

Brad: 01:01:30

Like to break up the tissue, kind.

Conor: 01:01:32

Of then examine it under microscope.

So they would already have like kind of these homogenizers that, these mixtures there to then take this water that they just made and this junk that they just made and mix them together essentially to then make these, these solution of these nano rods. And the thing is as well is that these aren't kind of toxic materials or gypsums used in food products back here on Earth.

Kind of ground up and put in as a kind of an additive, I think, for kind of calcium, because they're made from, they have a high amount of calcium into them. So it's kind of like supplementary kind of food. So I mean, like, you could technically have astronauts eat some of the anhydride stuff as well.

I mean, like, I know that there are issues with kind of bone density and stuff in space and space travel because of the gravity, the gravity and stuff.

So I mean, like, I, I don't know if then them being able to kind of eat the gypsum or eat the anhydride will actually be beneficial to their bones once they arrive to on Mars or they need like this sudden influx of loads of calcium to Help kind of reinforce the density of their bones and. But yeah, essentially we kind of took this whole idea of just like, like they already have this stuff on Mars.

So it's just like intention or in parallel, you'd be able to kind of make these kind of very useful materials.

And I suppose one of the things, like, I suppose restraints was like, I think kind of the word that we used and kind of the paper and always kind of something that I, I thought of initially when we were doing the work.

But I feel like now kind of like retrospectively looking back, because I feel like it wasn't really like, it's not really like of restraint to use more economical, more, you know, environmentally safe materials because there's so much of it out there. So it's not really, it's more so just looking elsewhere rather than kind of just being like, oh, we, we absolutely cannot use these materials.

If you kind of think of another way of just like, there's all this other stuff that we can use instead, I kind of, it seems less kind of daunting than that. It's just, yeah, looking back, I feel like more positive about it. Whereas before I was just like, oh, no, we can't, we can't use a solvent here.

How the hell are we going to get around this? And you know, like, would they use that up there then? No, they wouldn't be able, like they wouldn't have IPA up there.

Possibly, you know, I guess maybe they might have it for rubbing alcohol. They had wounds, but maybe they wouldn't want to use it or wouldn't be in a way that we would be able to process it.

So it's just like at the time it did seem like restraints, but now looking back. Yeah, it just seems like it's just. No, there are loads of options there.

I think it's just, just changing that frame of mind of just being like there are other ways of doing it. It's just I've been learned, I've been taught to only kind of do it one way. And I think it's kind of just trying to move past it.

And you know, at the moment with our other research as well, is that, you know, we've.

Before, we're like, you can't make, you know, good sensors or wearable sensors out of anything but, you know, like silicone and all these kind of really stretchable, you know, industry available materials. I'm just like, no. Like, no, they're must be other biological materials that are out there that are ready for the taking. We found seaweed as.

As the kind of the ultimate kind of material that we found that's really, really good at making sensors that a lot of people just kind of just. I suppose they probably just don't investigate because just everyone does polysilicone and solvents and all this kind of stuff. So it's just.

People just need to change the mentality all around.

Brad: 01:04:53

Yeah, that's. I mean, I love that. Not looking at it as constraints, but rather we'll look at all of these other materials that are available.

Yeah, like just flipping that positive, negative kind of thing. But it's.

It's kind of cool to me that it takes, you know, limiting yourself or saying, I'm not going to do things in the way that we've always done them. Which, again, feels like you're giving yourself boundaries. You're giving yourself, you know, this box that you have to operate in.

But in doing that, you just. On the other side of that box, you open up this wide open space of all the stuff that is available, which is, I don't know, like, just.

I don't know, it's just a neat. I think it's just sort of philosophy.

Conor: 01:05:33

Sort of thing, thinking about it. It's just like before, I now think, like, I had my blinkers on then.

I was restraining myself then because I was just like, this is what everyone does and this is how you do it. And I now feel like that's more of a restraint. It's like you need to be more flexible. You need to kind of. You need to think of something else.

Brad: 01:05:52

Yeah, yeah. And then just investigating the things around you. So the seaweed, then. What is it about seaweed that you found? And how did you.

How did you cue into seaweed? What gave you the idea for seaweed?

Conor: 01:06:06

Seaweed came from lockdown and watching Master Chef. Basically it was they made these things called, like, food caviar.

So it's like they get like, pureed prawns or jams or jellies and stuff, and they just mix it with a seaweed polymer and then you then drop it into a little bath of salts, calcium chloride, salt, which is also edible as well. And it would form these little capsules where you'd have the jam in the middle, and then you'd have, like a hydrogel layer surrounding it.

So you could like, pick it up and hold and stuff. You might have seen it kind of like in, like, fancy restaurants, will try and like, I don't know, put it across as like, ooh, fine dining experience.

But it just, literally, you just got to eat and goo. But, yeah, I just kind of just had this idea that it was just, you know, that seems really interesting. Very firm, very pliable.

I was like, well, what happens if we put graphene into it?

And that's really where it kind of just spawned from, is that we put graphene into and just found out that, like, just the system of the capsule itself was just such a cool system that we were able to kind of control so many parameters about the sensors that you can't do with any other material.

And it just allowed us to get just a really fine understanding of just generally how nanocomposite, which is nanomaterials mixed into a polymer, how those systems work in general.

So, like, globally, we, through the stupid idea of watching MasterChef, we're now able to kind of predictively understand and predict the performances of nanocomposites. Not only our own, but other people's sensing materials just using our modeling, just from mastership.

But it's just like, it's just, it was just like, you know, it's just something that was just that. The fact that it was like a sensor that you could eat. I was like that. Like that.

There is nothing more kind of economical and environmentally safe than that. It's like if you could eat it and, you know, fish eat seaweed and stuff, then, you know, the wildlife can metabolize.

I'm just like, this has been like a win, win. It's something that benefits us, but it's not hurting, you know, anyone else. Yeah.

Brad: 01:08:17

And then you got to think too, like, the, the cost of the starting material, like, if, you know, seaweed is a basic one. Yeah, that's. You could grow a lot of seaweed. I, I would imagine pretty, pretty cheaply.

Conor: 01:08:28

It was. Yeah, it's very, very cheap starting materials. And it doesn't, like, use a lot of the material that we bought.

Granted, we got completely screwed because the first time I bought it, I went to like this fancy gastronomy supplier and stuff. And I, I bought the seaweed from. It was really expensive. And then even bought the same seaweed off Amazon. It was literally exactly the same thing.

And it was like, I think the first time was like £50, and then the next time was like £5. And I think we got double the amount off Amazon as well.

I felt like such an idiot, but I was just there, like, I have to get stuff that they got off MasterChef, because that might be the only stuff that works. Oh, yeah. We felt like such. Well, I felt like such an idiot. We got there in the end, but yeah, it was a very unnecessary expense on my behalf.

Brad: 01:09:16

That's great. All right, well, let's. We could wind things down here. We've been talking for over an hour now.

But I think that's, you know, to me that's, I love this idea, like you said, of this philosophy of like do no harm and it really shows. And like I said, I never thought I would be covering this kind of stuff when I was an undergrad because I was so bad at chemistry and all this.

But it's, I really think it's such a fascinating thing because we talk, you know, sustainability, the environment, it is a big thing in the world right now. Like everybody's talking about it and it feels at times that it's like there's not a lot of progress being made.

But I think what you're showing is that there's a potential way to do things and it's less about we don't have the technology to do it, but it's more about we're not looking in the right places or we're not thinking about it in the right way. Which I think is a very inspiring message. Now, do you think this might be less inspiring? Maybe I'm going to turn it here.

But we have all of these interesting things, like this way of thinking, the things you're talking about, doing other things.

I've heard from similar people doing this type of research is that there is this inertia to get the uptake of this kind of thinking, this kind of technology, that kind of thing. Because systems have been built, the economy has been built on doing things with hydrocarbons, with oil, with petroleum, all of this stuff.

So it's going to take this time to a convince people, but then also actually to physically dismantle the. You have all these big petrochemical plants and it's like for a company that's like, okay, I like your product, I see that it's beneficial.

But I've invested millions of dollars in this factory that does it this way. So I'm not just going to abandon that now. Do you see that as a, as a challenge to overcome?

Conor: 01:11:20

Definitely. I mean it's, it's historically, it's just, it's happened lots.

Even with like the electric car, because wasn't it, I can't remember what supplier it was, but I think it was an American kind of manufacturer.

Is that there was the idea of the electric car and the ability to do it, but they kind of poo pooed it and kind of Shelved it just being like, we're not doing this because, yeah, as you said, we're invested in making cars a particular way and they're selling and why would we then disrupt the market?

So it's just like, yeah, there is that kind of impedance because, like, I hate to say it is that, like, yeah, some nanomaterials are not as economical as others. So, like, I'd say graphene, it's quite economical because, you know, it's. It can be naturally sourced. Like, you can find graphene.

But there is other materials that, like, you can get large, very large pushbacks on, like, things called Maxine.

So they're kind of titanium carbide materials, and they require a lot of harsh conditions and harsh solvents to be able to kind of just make the materials at all. But they're one of the largest and most investigated materials and nanoscience.

And, like, I'll admit is that, like, I've had large pushback from reviewers and editors.

Like, having to have sentences removed from publications naming them as potentially a pitfall in kind of research is that, yes, they're material that's very highly investigated, has fantastic properties, but if we cannot make them economically and environmentally sound, then maybe we shouldn't be looking at them at all.

And, yeah, I've experienced slight pushback and with certain kind of statements like that is that some nanomaterials just shouldn't be investigated because, yeah, you just, like, you just can't make them. Like, I think, like, I can't remember specifically.

o put it in the oven at, like: 1200

And then when you get them, you have to use, like, hydrofluoric acid to etch the layers out. So, like, stuff that, like, had a breaking bad, like dissolving bodies and stuff. So it's just like really kind of, like, dodgy stuff. And it's just.

I understand that they have fantastic properties, but it's just one of those things. Where is all this waste gonna go? Like, if we're gonna go, okay, vaccines are the way forward, and this is what we're going to be using all the time.

It's just, they're like, you know, where is. Yeah, where's all this junk gonna go? Like, it's just. Yeah, I.

I have seen Kind of small pushbacks with regards to that and not so much kind of, I suppose, like things like seaweed and kind of like alternative polymers and stuff. I have to admit that people have been kind of quite receptive.

And I do see people, like, the trends are kind of going up, that people are interested and those types of kind of materials. I don't know whether now it's kind of.

Because it's new and it's sexy and it's kind of something's interesting, it might be more impacting, might get you into a better journal. I'm not really sure. It's kind of hard to say.

I'm sure it's probably 50, 50 of people consciously wanting to do better than also thinking, jackpot, this is going to be a really good paper. But I'd like to kind of give people the benefit of the doubt and think that, like, people really do want to kind of make these. Make these changes.

But, yeah, I think the only kind of pushbacks that I personally have ever experienced was kind of, I don't want to say naming and shaming certain materials, but just kind of just saying, like, you know, you know, we have to ourselves as researchers just say, you know, we said, we set this benchmark. You need to be like, at this level of, of environmental sustainability. And, you know, if you don't meet it, you know, maybe we shouldn't be.

We shouldn't be looking at this material, we shouldn't be funding it, and we shouldn't. We shouldn't be investigating. But, I mean, I know those are probably like, big statements anyway, but I mean, like, it's.

And it's probably never going to happen because, yeah, Max scenes are just, as I said, they're the biggest ones that I think are kind of the biggest issue because there's such. Such huge investigation into them.

But they're just so terrible, it seems, for the environment, despite, I think, what I don't know, people say, and I mean, they've changed the way in which they synthesize them, but they still use harsh, terrible solvents because it still has this issue of that the Maxines are kind of like graphite, is that there are layered materials, but with graphite it's van der Waals. So it's these weak intermolecular forces that hold the layers together. But with Maxines, it's covalent bonds.

So there's physical and an atomic layer that holds them together. So you have to etch away those atoms to be able to separate out the sheets.

And you have to use harsh solvents to preferentially remove those atoms, to get the layers and get these kind of nanosheets. And there's no way around it. It's just you always have to use these harsh acids.

You always have to then use these harsh bases to then quench your solutions as well, to be able to, you know, kind of remove or reduce the acidity. You'd be able to process them. And yeah, I think it's.

It's one of the, the biggest issues, I think, is that, you know, as you said, is that people have invested so much in kind of certain things. It's really hard to then reel yourself back in and go. And maybe take a step back and go, like, is this the best idea?

Like, and, you know, I don't blame people. As I said, like, you know, the Maxine stuff, they have fantastic properties. They really, really do. They.

They've had fantastic studies on their abilities and being able to kind of perform a large area from energy to, you know, computing to even wearable sensors as well.

But it's just, yeah, it's very difficult to then take that step back and go, okay, I'm gonna completely change, essentially field or kind of do a complete pivot and go to something else. Because, I mean, it's a gold mine. Like, the journals love, love the Maxines because they just.

They have so many interesting studies that come out on them.

Brad: 01:17:32

Yeah, I think this is where. And, you know, it's not completely my idea.

I've talked with other researchers about this kind of stuff, but it's like, this is almost where you need, you know, those kind of costs are not. The environmental costs are usually not, you know, built into the economic model of is this going to be profitable or not?

And this is where things like politics, policy, laws that put a penalty on that kind of thing.

So we were talking about putting constraints on and maybe not looking at as constraints, but this is the analogy I'm going to use is like putting constraints on or a cost on that kind of thing. Seems like a way that we could push this further, push the sustainability thing further.

Because what I hear from researchers all the time and kind of, I think what you're saying, saying as well is, like, it's not that we can't do it. You know, there's all of these other options out there.

There's all of these other materials out there that we can use that will be, you know, better for the environment, better for all the things, and they would still do the things that we want them to do, and we could do it in an economic way.

Like it wouldn't challenge the cost that much, but there's just this momentum that needs to build up and you got to get, make the case and, and you know, again, I think pricing environmental damage, you know, is a big part of it, but it's hard. That's probably, yeah, it's a, that's a whole nother challenge and a whole nother podcast for another day.

So let's, let's, we can end it there because I think it's still a positive note. I don't think that was a negative note to end things on, but thank you so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed the conversation.

It was, yeah, really interesting and I'm, I'm going to be following this stuff again. You know, I'm going to continue to follow this stuff is what I mean to say. And you're welcome to come back anytime.

Conor: 01:19:26

Oh yeah.

Brad: 01:19:27

To talk about more seaweed updates or space or whatever the, wherever the nanomaterials bring us.

Conor: 01:19:32

Hey, there's a lot of things they're going to talk about in academia that, you know, people don't, people just, I don't know, they just got to sleep under the rug. It's a weird, it's a weird, I don't want to say industry, but yeah, it's a weird work environment and stuff. It's just, it's tough.

You know, as an early career academic, I, I definitely kind of sympathize with people in similar positions. It's, it's taxing, it's definitely kind of taxing on kind of mental health and stuff. And I think that's kind of one of the.

Oh yeah, I don't want to now, it's end on a bad note or whatever. But yeah, I think that that's still, that's also kind of like one of the one things that I would just love people to talk about more in academia.

I think it's kind of just mental health.

I think it is very, it's a very, very important kind of topic that kind of gets swept under because I just think it's just, it's a very different industry to you know, working in a company or anything like that. It's kind of, it's so lax. You know, there's no real like line managers and stuff and you know, you have multiple people to report to.

But then also you're, then, you know, if you're a PhD, you're working on your own project that you know that you're kind of self starting yourself so it's just. Yeah, there's a lot of kind of moving parts. I think that's kind of the. The main takeaway. Look after yourselves, essentially. Yeah, it's always.

It's a tough, tough industry.

Brad: 01:20:50

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's pros and cons to it. Right.

Like, it's, you know, the freedom, you know, this, this thing we were talking about, you're getting to pursue this, this. This ultimate curiosity kind of thing, you know, being sort of at the creation of new knowledge, all of that stuff.

But yeah, the sort of work environment and structures in place for all that kind of stuff is, I think. Yeah. Needs to be examined as well. I think anyone that's gone through academia that's listening to this will be like, yep, yeah, it's.

I could feel that. But, yeah, we could. Maybe that's again, a topic for another show.

Conor: 01:21:23

Part two.

Brad: 01:21:24

Yeah. Part two. Yeah. Thanks again so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Brad: 01:21:35

And thank you all for listening. I really, really appreciate your listenership. So please let me know what you think of the show. Leave a comment, Send us a message.

Again, go to the website. All of our contact details, all that stuff is there. Or Instagram is where you can most easily reach us at twobred4u.

And of course, like, subscribe, review, comment, all those great things, wherever you get your podcast or. Or on now, the YouTube channel. Thank you so much to Connor Bolan for. For sharing his time with us. I really enjoyed the conversation. And that's it.

I don't have anything else. So until next time, take care of yourselves. Let's listen to the freak motif. Carry us out here.

Brad: 01:22:18

Bye for.