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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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It could also be that the material is just not all that special. "Stronger than steel" is a very easy goal to achieve. Lighter is easy too. Now pair those two with higher fracture toughness, and you have something worth talking about.
Recovering machinist here, and I agree. The other thing that annoys me about "StRoNgEr ThAn StEeL" is that there is a wide variety of different types of steel, all with different strength charachteristics. Some types of steel are 5x stronger than other types of steel.
Same thing for Ford's "Military grade" aluminum. The truck bodies are made out of 5052 and 6061 depending on how it's shaped. Those are literally the most common grades of aluminum. And that's what you'd make a truck body out of, but its funny.
Also, industrial grade, surgical grade, space grade or whatever grade stuff is just funny marketing BS to me. You could probably come up with fancy terms for selling something as mundane as pencils. Instead of calling the materials wood and graphite, these marketing monkeys would probably use some fancy super high tech words instead.
These advanced pencils are designed by A.I. and use biological carbon foam encasing stacked layers of graphene!
How about throwing in some ”organic lignin composite nanomaterial” to jazz up the sales pitch. Just imagine the 300 million years of continuous development to form this fine material with extraordinary tensile properties…
"lignin" was the word I couldn't think of, thanks! I probably should have tried to crowbar "blockchain" in there somewhere.
Oh, totally forgot about blockchains. I wonder if there’s a way to include blockchains, NFTs and cryptocurrencies into a pencil purchase. Maybe each package of pencils could come with an NFT corresponding with the physical objects or something like that. Remember that time when people wanted to buy NFTs corresponding to a part of the world map. Well, why would you want to own the NFT of France when you can own the NFT of this pencil. :D
The only one I have personal experience with that's real would be "analytical grade" with respect to chemicals. And probably Food grade. Those actually mean something.
The real success here seems to be creating a super nano configurable lattice out of DNA that can then be coated with other things to make a composite reinforced material like super fine reinforced cement. The article I've read only mention the 5 times compressive strength for glass, but their next try will be carbon fiber, which has comparable fracture toughness to steel even without this lattice design.
I guess I don't understand all the negativity in this thread, like everything was new once and just because every breakthrough doesn't make it to Walmart by Christmas doesn't mean it's not exciting.
It’s because people have been seeing the same headline for decades, and 99% of the time it leads to nothing useful. Also, the headline is over-selling it by comparing it to fictional miracle materials.
Ok, you're probably bored with this conversation, so don't take this personally, but I'm going to double down. Check this summary of composite history in aircraft.
It took 30-40 years from first industrial use to ubiquity, that's not counting the time between research success to first industrial use. If you see things move from lab to everyday use within your lifetime that's more or less expected rate of progress.
And the scientists involved were inspired by the movie, that's not hype, is just how people are motivated to make these first steps when they know they may not even live to see the real world outcomes.
I mean.. Also the looming climate apocalypse.
Yeah, theres a reason why trains, ships, and trucks are all made with steel. The ongoing toughness. Higher fracture or whatever the engineers call it.