It may just be incidental or irrelevant, but I find the video of the steak cutting to be incredibly unconvincing. It looked like they just pushed apart a piece of well cooked meat like you could do with a spoon and slow cooked pork.
Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
101–110 of 168 posts
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting knives past airport security seems not particularly difficult from the experience of my circle and other anecdotal sources. I've had friends and family accidentally get knives through security on many occasions, and I have also accidentally done it myself. To my knowledge none of them has ever been caught in the converse situation and had to give up a knife. I imagine if one were resourceful and deliberate ab…
Ceramic knives sold to the general public are supposed to have a metal core to make them detectable. All ceramics are available for people (police, military) who need a hard to detect self-defence knife, eg: https://gearward.com/products/ceramic-escape-knife
People should be terrified that the "undetectables" are reserved only for the "authorities".
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#103This is awesome especially since I make wooden knives! Specifically out of sugar maple, since they’re nice and hard. I make them to look like steak knives as a joke, but they work great on cheese, butter, and steamed vegetables. If you ever want to get into woodworking you can pick up a bandsaw for a couple hundred bucks and they’re a great first project.
May i suggest you find a bit of Cocobolo to play with? Awesome stuff. Also recovered barnwood white oak, if you can work it. It's like ceramic.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#104That is a pretty cool result. The idea of a material with the hardness of steel but without the oxidizing issues is pretty appealing too.
The mentioned that it became "squishy" and then they pressed it to become its final shape. Building boats this way would be an interesting application.
And it would be interesting to understand its combustion properties. "Engineered wood" is all the rage in home building in North America because getting long structural timbers has become so expensive. If you add this to the set of techniques on engineered lumber, could you build better structural members with less material? Could you build those materials out of layered materials? (think oriented strand board (OSB) as 4 x 6 equivalent).
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting knives past airport security seems not particularly difficult from the experience of my circle and other anecdotal sources. I've had friends and family accidentally get knives through security on many occasions, and I have also accidentally done it myself. To my knowledge none of them has ever been caught in the converse situation and had to give up a knife. I imagine if one were resourceful and deliberate ab…
Ceramic knives sold to the general public are supposed to have a metal core to make them detectable. All ceramics are available for people (police, military) who need a hard to detect self-defence knife, eg: https://gearward.com/products/ceramic-escape-knife
Ceramic knives seem quite fragile in the kitchen, I am skeptical they have a lot of potential as weapons, as even small amounts of twisting/shearing force will crack or snap them.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is conflating people who want or need to use steel with those who don't. Look at the JunkFoodTasterDotCom YouTube channel for example. He always cuts stuff. He uses a plastic knife. He's not an engineer. That is more to my point: Steel isn't needed in a surprising number of knife use cases. I'm not surprised that an engineer wants to speak on behalf of steel and its properties. But that probably won't stop produ…
what? steel works well. its really cheap - both in economic and physical terms. it recycles perfectly, and if you do leave it in the ground on the water, its not going to harm anything. lasts a really long time, more with care. seems like a really great design fit. Maybe there are better opportunities elsewhere?
I mean if you really want to defend steel, celebrate it, be my guest. But materials research and design for product development is a really cool area of focus and quite a different direction from what you are talking about. Especially in that we just don't know--it's not about the past, it's about the future. I hope to see it more with things like knives and tools.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just reminds me that paper moved fast enough can probably already cut meat
I got a papercut and I'm made out of meat!
don't try this at home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYfkhdKcEiE
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it a win for everyone though? If we have X cases where people brought knives onto planes, and no notable incidents of knife-enabled violence in the past few years, what's the motivation for reducing X by half? I'm sure that some would-be-criminals are dissuaded by the TSA, but that seems to already be working today. It seems like a very reasonable outcome would be no decrease in airline violence/crime, but an incr…
Great point! Although I'd think P(knife hijacking)*Cost(knife hijacking) would be much much larger than the cost of knives being confiscated, even if P(knife hijacking) is very small, just given how cheap knives are and how big that Cost is. I think the bigger point is how much the software would cost and whether the reduction in X justifies that expenditure. Also need to consider cost savings of being able to fire s…
The scenario I see:
Joe McRandom is heading through TSA, and is falsely flagged as having a knife by this software.
Because the computer _can't_ be wrong - a depressingly common view among anyone who doesn't work with computers regularly - the TSA agent flags our friend Joe. Joe's entire luggage is then unpacked, in front of everyone present - hope he didn't have anything sensitive in there!
When he inevitably does not have a knife in his luggage, the TSA agent spends way too much time searching for the secret compartment, as well as digging through all the stuff. When there is _still_ no knife to be found, Joe is taken into custody - we've already seen that airport security can be trusted to abuse their power - causing Joe to miss his flight, be psychologically damaged (I'd be pretty shook up after that degree of search and detainment), and possibly lose his luggage (better hope the TSA did a good job keeping track of it, and decides you deserver to have it)!
Is this situation likely, strictly speaking? Over the massive number of TSA agents working and travel being done, I would say yes. All of the negative effects of the TSA mentioned above already happen, a system like this just makes it more likely to be occur for no real reason.
Also, while the average knife may not be expensive, some are. On top of that, many who carry knives form emotional attachments to them, so even if there's no "real" damage being done, there is some amount of harm being done in a much harder to quantify way.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#109Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#110> "So the second step is that we apply pressure. We also increase the temperature. The purpose of that is to really densify the natural wood and also remove the water, reducing its thickness to around 20 per cent of the original natural wood."
Very interesting. One question I'd have is what happens when the hardened wood is exposed to moisture over a long period of time? Humid climates? Does it reabsorb water which would take away from the hardness? The article did mention it could "survive a dishwasher" but doesn't clarify what that actually means. What happens over time when you use it as a nail if the wood you're nailing it into is moist?