Glass
A month and a half had passed relatively peacefully aboard the Rosalie now that it was finally back at sea. Summer would soon be upon them, but for now the days were pleasantly cool and while they were safe in the Mediterranean, the women had enjoyed the pleasant weather on the main deck. Helene continued her studies and Rosalie played with her growing son and mended in the warmth of the sun.
Liam had not been too terrible about treating his wife as though she might break if he touched her, but it was clear the memory of his sister’s miscarriage was fresh in his mind. It did not seem to matter that baby Patrick was a fierce little fellow, and more mischievous by the day; only that his wife might suffer the same way her sister had.
He spent most of his days below, out of their way. Helene had not had to endure too much mollycoddling. Not yet.
“There’s been a letter from Maman,” Rosalie was saying, wrestling his father’s shirt out of Patrick’s tiny fingers. He protested in his half-intelligible language, one that seemed half-French and half-Gaelic, but she tutted until he let go.
Stressing Gorilla Glass Makes It Stronger
by Sophie Bushwick, Inside Science
Alterations to the usual glass production process, such as putting the material under stress, can introduce effects that linger even after the material hardens. While manufacturers have long exploited this phenomenon to strengthen glass, a new theory aims to get closer to understanding why it happens.
Glass is not as well understood as most materials, because it straddles the line between liquid and solid. In typical crystalline materials, molecules assemble into a set structure over the span of the entire material as the substance solidifies from a disordered liquid form. Glass, on the other hand, retains a liquid-like disorder even after it hardens.
Without a set architecture, these disordered molecules are particularly vulnerable to outside forces. If you push or pull on a substance, you create internal forces, or stress, in the material itself. Once you remove that force, you’d expect the molecules to return to equilibrium, removing the stresses. But glassy materials “remember” the long-gone force.
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