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A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

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71–80 of 135 posts

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#71
post #59

One of my biggest everyday QoL upgrade is men's casual pants finally getting elastane. E: not just elastane but performance fabrics from athleisure in general, good moisture/odour/temperature control, easy to maintain etc. Some people like break in into their cotton/denim classics, but performance fabrics tend to not need break in in at all.

complete disaster. terrible for your skin, feels gross, falls apart, and cannot be repaired. meanwhile my cotton pants that have been repaired many times are still treasured wardrobe items almost 10 years on.

I think they feel fantastic, especially performance fabrics during summer. Falls apart, depends. As thicc thigh toucher, I rub through cotton/denim within a few months. Unless I reinforce crotch area with sacrificial patch. I've never worn through stretch fabrics, hence no need to repair. As someone whose weight fluctuates, cotton also gets stretched out.

Other than that, good moisture and odor control, comfort/mobility of stretch too much of life upgrade. Also fairly wrinkle/iron free. I'd take convenience over durability anytime.

I will say synthetics haven't been able to replace bed sheets on most of criterias above.

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wood was a chief enabler of the success of our species Wood was the chief enabler of trees. Trees have to be big, strong, lightweight, and bendable. Homogeneous materials won't work for that application. You need a composite. So evolution invented one. Even more amazing: Trees 3D print themselves out of carbon dioxide.

>Trees have to be big, strong, lightweight, and bendable. Homogeneous materials won't work for that application. Why wouldn't titanium work for that application? (Assume that somehow the plant can move nutrients and fluids around some other way.) Or even steel, as long as it's not solid? Obviously, nature can't produce hollow steel tubes, but lots of metals satisfy your requirement list here.

In any stellar system like ours, where oxygen is the most abundant element, except for the hydrogen and helium that are contained mostly in the star and in the big planets, almost all metals are completely oxidized (with the exception of the siderophile elements submerged into the cores of the planets, because of their great density) and the amount of metallic substances with a natural origin that can be found in the accessible surface layers of the planets is negligible.

Reducing the oxidized metals requires much more energy than reducing non-metals like carbon, nitrogen and sulfur (which is what the living beings do to make their structural materials), and preventing the reduced metals to spontaneously become oxidized again is very difficult.

This is why no living beings have succeeded to use metallic materials before the humans, and the latter have succeeded to do this only after mastering the fire, which is the other thing that the non-human living beings have not succeeded to do.

There exists a second class of stellar systems, where there is more carbon than oxygen, so almost all oxygen remains bound in carbon oxides, while most other elements are present as carbides, instead of oxides, like in the Solar System. These are much more rare than the stellar systems of the Solar System type and in such stellar systems the chemical composition of the planets would be extremely different from the planets of the Solar System. Because there is no detailed information about such a stellar system (due to their distance), there is very little knowledge about whether there would be conditions in such a system for the appearance of life and how could that evolve. If there is any chance for primitive life forms to use metals in their structures, that would happen only in such stellar systems.

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#73
post #14

As a hiker/outdoors person, materials evolution has been a fantastic improvement in so many ways. Even lightweight traveling.

I'm sure we'll be so excited to eventually find out what exactly all that teflon in goretex does to our healthy outdoorsy bodies.

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#74

Nitpick time: > Modern composites, starting with Bakelite AFAIK Bakelite is a resin, not a composite. No mention of fiberglass, which had been used for many decades before carbon fiber went into widespread use. > composites—which are amalgamations of a variety of fibers, embedded in a variety of plastics Steel reinforced concrete is a composite and doesn’t fit this definition.

Also swear Bakelite is older than my grandpa, not sure it's exactly "modern"

Right? "Bakelite" is practically synonymous with "old, pre-WWII plastic material".

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#75

Were the soviets that far ahead? Because the T3 trams from the 60s were already made of composites.

Parts of the DDR era Trabant cars were also made out of composites.

In the eastern block we used to call it eastern BMW - Bakelite Motor Vehicle (although bakelite wasn't exactly the composite used as it seems). Or that repair set for it comprised of just carpet tape. It didn't have that great reputation, at least not in 80s.

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#77
post #76

It's always fun to read an article like this, spot the "this is a press release" tone, and then spot which company had it placed in the WSJ. Along with a quote from the CEO. It's basically free advertising.

Are you going to tell us who?

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not great for the environment though, with plastic microfibers washing into our oceans and DWR coatings being toxic and leaching into waterways. Compared to, say, what they climbed Everest with originally, yeah, our gear today is lighter, cheaper, more effective, but also more environmentally impactful and much less degradable. It's all just byproducts of the oil industry. We're a lot more comfortable now, b…

It's cheaper and doesn't last as long, but wouldn't that translate into being more degradable, not less? There are fewer atoms there, and the whole microplastics problem is it losing atoms.

Degradability is a function of how chemically stable a molecule is, not the number of atoms. Sure, plastics break down in smaller particles but the issue is that some of these smaller particles or microplastics are incredibly stable.

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#79
A swing and a miss. The future of materials is going back to plant fiber; wood, hemp, etc. There will be plenty of fancy composite materials for specialty applications; but our world has been made out of plastic for generations now and updated, improved plant fiber materials will replace it as the affordable, more sustainable, and equally functional alternative.

Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both iron and titanium are ubiquitous in the crust. I think they are the 4th and 9th most common elements, and definitely far more common than carbon.

Yeah, but plants don't normally pull carbon out of the ground; they get it from the air.

No reason they couldn’t, if it was advantageous for them though.
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