if, if I'm understanding correctly, sometimes you actually want these defects within the material, right? Can you give us a bit of a background of what exactly these defects are, what they might be?

In essence, it can, it can be a whole wide range of things.

These carbon materials might have other elements other than carbon.

You know, when they're being formed, they're often in high temperature reactions, so they might react with oxygen or nitrogen, and then those atoms then get incorporated into the rings of the material.

Or there might be rings that are non-hexagonal, which is what most of these materials are made from.

They're mostly based on the archetypal structure of graphene, um, where all the carbons are sp2 hybridized.

There might just be gaps in the material where there are no rings in general, vacancy defects.

... depth for that?

So Mason, what have we learned about the chemistry behind what is causing the concrete to crack?

That's a good question.

So as you mentioned in your intro, this issue is being known as the mica crisis, and so mica is a silicate aggregate material that is found in concrete, sort of helps thicken the concrete to kind of give it its structural stability.

And so when some of these homes were starting to show signs of cracking and crumbling, analysis revealed that a lot of buildings that were affected had high levels of mica.

And so people kind of reached the conclusion that this must be the reason that is causing the buildings to crack.

And the reason that is, is that because it thickens concrete, that can make it quite difficult to pour, so then you're gonna have to add quite a lot of water to give it the right consistencies that you can make it into prefabricated blocks that many of these homes are built with.

But then the issue is that if you've got a lot of water, when you've got varying temperatures sort of above and below the freezing point of water, the water in that concrete is changing from water to ice, and that expansion and contraction of that water can then sort of degrade the concrete that you've got.

So is it, is it just an Irish problem?

Can you elaborate on some of the advantages? We've touched on some of them in the intro, but yeah, how, how does this have a leg up on fractional distillation?

An interesting fact that I came across when I was looking at this is that to be able to do fractional distillation, you need to often currently burn crude oil to generate the heat that you need to do fractional distillation, and around 10% of crude oil is used to do that process.

So I guess one benefit is that you're getting more crude oil out and not wasting it.

However, it's probably worth mentioning that that's not necessarily a reason to be doing this process.

I think a, a key advantage is that we're starting to see a transformation of using crude oil as a fuel to being able to use crude oil as a chemical feedstock.

And some of these membranes are really good because you get better selectivity of the types of chemicals that you're separating.

So one of them is able, for example, to separate your aromatic and your aliphatic compounds with high selectivity, which allows chemists then able to do different reactions on, on those, and that was maybe a, a difficult challenge that people m- weren't able to separate those out as easily.

For it to be feasible, people need to see where the money's gonna come from from it, which is, it's annoying because, you know, I don't like to think like that, but I mean, that, that is kind of the world we live in.

So what were Frank and Jack looking at? What detail were they kind of honing in for their theory?

So it's a theory that has kind of trickled through over the past few decades, and it's to do with the empty ethanol barrels that you have.

So the idea is that potentially there was some sort of explosion that wouldn't have left any trace of the explosion happening.

And that would explain why certain number of the barrels were empty.

And so what they do in their experiment, which is perhaps the most accurate type of this experiment.

Others have kind of done this before.

They take a model of the ship, which is, I guess, approximately the size of like an air fryer for context.

How is this story pervaded for so long?