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Iron Man-inspired material made from DNA and glass is 5x stronger than steel — and 4x lighter
(www.zmescience.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I always hear about these new amazing materials. While they’re great concepts they’re usually held back by how crazy expensive they are to produce. I’m betting this falls into that bin
Yep. As soon as you read the title you know it's useless.
Either too expensive, or it only works at a microscopic level but doesn't scale, or just doesn't actually work.
It's like all the cancer cures you hear about that unfortunstely mostly don't pan out. Just clickbait headlines.
That one is worse than you think. More than one viable cancer cure was destroyed by stock market shenanigans - bad actors short sell the company in to the ground, take over the board, destroy what's left of the company, sell off what they can piecemeal while trashing the rest, and they do it that way only because they don't have to pay back those shorted stocks with no company anymore, they don't at all care what the company is doing only that they can parasitize it. It's twisted as hell.
Got a source for this? Sounds like an interesting story
I had it linked in my reddit account which I wiped clean months ago.. if I have time I'll search the account dump for it though.
A cure for a cancer is worth billions.
They want instant gratification and lack all empathy towards others. They're sociopaths.
Cures are worthless compared to lifetime treatment regiments. That's putting aside the other facts like how widely varied cancers can be making a singular "cure" infeasible.
This is ridiculous. "Company name cures cancer" would be the greatest advertising for any company ever. Cancer will still happen and the cure will always be needed. It would be wildly profitable.
One thing to always have in mind is that the poor researchers making these discoveries are victims too. They spend months, if not years researching and when they publish their research some random tech website make a clickbait article about it, usually by taking a few sentences out of context and using hyperbole.
A lot of cancer stuff isn’t actually a cure, and if it is it’s only for a specific type of cancer and the success rate is never a headline item.
So you read a headline that says “cure of cancer” which is conveniently leaving out “for specific cancer abc in these specific circumstances with a success rate of 58%”
There’s never really been a true “cure for all cancer 100% success rate” found, and anyone who claims otherwise is misunderstanding the science being discussed.
not to mention many such "cures" that make it to the headlines are still the animal trial phase...
Aluminum was used as the cap to the Washington monument because it was worth so much...
Takes a while to make stuff cheap
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.
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.
Yeah articles talking about them usually say something about how "in 10 to 20 years it'll be ready for mass production!" and then you never hear about them again.