Nylon fishing line is stronger than steel and light as plastic.
And is nylon able to form rigid 3 dimensional structures?
MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
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Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#42Nylon fishing line is stronger than steel and light as plastic.
...in tension.
Surely that's the joke. There must be two or three of these "scientists make material stronger and lighter than steel" headlines every year for decades (probably for as long as steel has existed, lmao.) The headline never specifies what they actually mean by "stronger than steel", but the naive reader would walk away with the impression that steel is now an obsolete material, which never pans out.
Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add to your point. New R&D for plastics is probably where the solution to microplastics is going to come from. Some researcher building the next superplastic pauses to say "hey that's funny" and bam we've got a new formula that completely prevents the formation of microplastics. Artificially constraining development is a great way to either miss an important direction of research that will unknowingly solve our pr…
> Some researcher building the next superplastic pauses to say "hey that's funny" and bam we've got a new formula that completely prevents the formation of microplastics. My understanding is that microplastics are a result of regular wear and tear, and I don't think a material exist that is immune to that. If anything, a new plastic formula may be created that hardens it enough to reduce the shedding to a negligible…
The solution might be a plastic that naturally decomposes. Of course, that would likely make the material less durable...
Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#44Nylon fishing line is stronger than steel and light as plastic.
And is nylon able to form rigid 3 dimensional structures?
For some values of 'rigid', yes. Here's a bicycle made out of nylon:
https://www.bikeradar.com/news/airbike-nylon-bicycle-first-l...
> Two British engineers have designed a bike, christened the Airbike, made entirely of nylon – and they claim it’s as strong as steel.
Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#45Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#46I wonder what kind of efficiencies can be gained by swapping out metal for this in EV vehicles
Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world should absolutely solve the micro plastics issue, but the world should absolutely not stop developing new plastics or finding new uses for plastics until that problem is solved. There should be more research into the impact of micro plastic particles. That doesn't mean we should stop research into new applications. These things can, and should, happen in parallel.
Exactly, plastic is not a material but a very broad category of materials with a wide range of properties. Micro-plastics are a specific problem with some plastics and rubbers in e.g. tires and other materials on cars because they erode away with normal use and the resulting dust is then flushed into sewers, waterways, and eventually the ocean. Material science is providing a wide range of new and exciting options th…
> Dismissing something with essentially no understanding whatsoever is not helpful.
The problem with the plastics industry, the reason so many people are fed up with it, is the 'understanding' you speak of tends to lag their industrial application by many years. So we end up with a whole lot of "X is now known to have bad properties, but we already use too much of it to change now." For instance, virtually every thermoset plastic in use today is impossible to recycle, but there seems to be no going back. Their use continues to proliferate.
Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#48This looks very interesting, in particular that it can be made gas-tight: > "Another key feature of 2DPA-1 is that it is impermeable to gases. While other polymers are made from coiled chains with gaps that allow gases to seep through, the new material is made from monomers that lock together like LEGOs, and molecules cannot get between them." However, this is yet another example of how excessive corporatization of a…
> for free, as it was American taxpayers who financed this project. Just because something was financed by taxpayer money does not mean it should be free. It is definitely not a rule or how things work. Although I am curious what are the disadvantages of making it free, I bet there are some, even if lightweight.
Speculating, but would a 1-2% sales tax that was offset from other taxes on products that used a govt patented TCP/IP have hampered development? It wouldn't have hurt FOSS because a 1% sales or import/export sales tax on old unix install media wouldn't have been significant, and once we had FOSS, we could have included the patented tech in free versions, where it was only when you sold media the sales tax was applied.
Not sure how many patents are held in limbo by govt, but well crafted rules about just a sales tax on products that include govt patented techs could be a plausibly fair way to recoup research investments while making them free to innovation. It's somewhere between the way the (pernicious) RIAA/FACTOR collects royalties on music via surcharges on broadcast and streaming, old "shareware" licenses, and the viral aspect of the GPL, but instead it's via a sales tax.
It could be a unique case for opening up patent archives but then adding a niche licensing and import/export tax on products that use the govt patented materials or technology. Even though I think the idea of using taxes as incentives is fundamentally broken, and there is someting dystopian about universities effectively collecting private taxes through the patent system, in a case like technology transfer, it opens up the tech for innovation and doesn't collect until revenue and profit are realized. It's tax revenue a govt has actually earned by investing, so there is even a plausible libertarian case for it.
Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
...in tension.
Surely that's the joke. There must be two or three of these "scientists make material stronger and lighter than steel" headlines every year for decades (probably for as long as steel has existed, lmao.) The headline never specifies what they actually mean by "stronger than steel", but the naive reader would walk away with the impression that steel is now an obsolete material, which never pans out.
Perhaps these materials scientists are in a friendly competition with the scientists behind all the "Scientists invent revolutionary new battery technology" headlines.
Re: MIT Engineers Create New Material Stronger Than Steel and Light as Plastic
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I like the idea of modular phones such that you can swap out only components that are obsolete or damaged. Although, ultimately, this feels like a market/advertising issue over a technical issue. While I'm not convinced a 100% recycle phone will ever be a likelihood; surely we can get to 90%. Or slow down the trash generation with the aforementioned modular phone. However it's going to require people to wa…
How much does a modular design really extend the life of a computer? Very few people (my father aside) are actively trying to keep computers from the 90’s orearly 2000’s alive. That my 10-year-old MacBook is still kicking is kind of a miracle (and only because I have harvested the guts from two others).
I once set up a computer workshop using PCs discarded by university labs. I assembled about a dozen PCs from about 20 discards. One of them served as a DSL router.
In retrospect, I regret it; I saved those PCs from going to the dump, but:
- They were not power-efficient
- Because the hardware was a decade old, they had poor connectivity options
I used to seek out computers that were maximally upgradeable. But in practice, the only thing I ever upgraded was disk and memory. I still have a box of obsolete memory cards. Stuff gets obsolete very quickly these days.