"First, natural wood blocks were immersed in a boiling aqueous solution of mixed 2.5 M NaOH and 0.4 M Na2SO3 for 7 h, followed by immersion in boiling deionized water several times to remove the chemicals. Next, the wood blocks were pressed at 100 °C under a pressure of about 5 MPa for about 1 day to obtain the densified wood"
The real question for practical purposes is how much of these fine chemicals are actually consumed during the process and how much can be reused. The foul-smelling Kraft process has held on to its title in paper production because the chemicals it uses can be recycled within the plant itself. There are many better, less polluting ways to make paper, but they consume an impractical amount of chemicals which drives the price way out of economic usability.
This process will need to regenerate almost all of that sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, or it's just peracetic paper again.
I wouldn't. The numerous miscarriages that my grandmother had while living in a mill town, and the cancer diagnoses that followed family who worked at the mill taught me to stay upstream of mill towns.
My thoughts as well. I was holding a board the other day and it just seemed, forgive me, aerosol-ized. Like those Aero chocolates that are essentially full of bubbles. "This new wood doesn't feel like wood used to" and shook my fist at the passing cloud.
I have high hopes for this product as a leg of sustainability.
My first thought as well. Considering they are the fastest growing plants. We cant stop the world from using steel or be carbon sensitive on things. But as soon as economics incentives kicks in we could decarbonise faster than most could imagine. I really hope timber technology improves to the point like solar where we would plant forest the size of a state.
The problem that I see is that, if the thickness is so drastically reduced as in the video posted somewhere above, you will need (much, much) thicker wood to start with.
There is a great deal of prior art in aviation and automotive engineering for densified wood, which have all proven to be non competitive with metal.
Lighter, stronger, but not quickly adaptable to new designs or refinements.....the molds are large, complex, heavy, and expensive.
And a simple no go for beams is that they(wood) burns and steel does not, will instantly remove them(wood) from bieng used in most building codes past a certain hight, where minimum times for evacuation durring a fire can not be met.
One of the reasons why Ipe (pronounced “e-pay”) wood is so fire resistant, is because of its density. You can get Class-A fire resistant Ipe that can be used to build in the Wildland/Urban Interface environment. Other woods like Teak and Rock Maple are also super dense, but I don’t know if you can get them in Class A ratings.
Now, Ipe is very expensive. I would hope this is less expensive than Ipe, and then the trick is to make your starting materials much larger, and being able to account for the shrinkage once the densification process has been completed.
You could also do laminates of this densified wood, in order to be able to use it for beams, plywood type functions, etc…. Or even fire resistant 2x4 boards.
I was under the impression that mass timber buildings were actually safer for fires because it takes a very long time to burn through, and unlike steel they won't lose their strength in an intense fire.
what maters is time to escape befor "total involvement", or confaguration, steel contributes nothing to a fire, fire cant climb or follow it, and it acts as a heat sink, vs wood, which is fuel.
All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that.
Add in modern fire suppresion and fighting equipment and the current situation is quite secure vs/vs fire.
edit, another factor is comunication and road infrastructure, where the recent fire storm in California, destroyed many many wooden structures, but the loss of life was exceptionaly low compared to other firestorms in less developed countrys.
woods great, love the stuff, have a lot of wood, live in a wooden house and heat with wood, but there is essentialy no way that can be done with
a thousand people in a huge building, so steel, which I also love and work with.
Everything in it's place.
"total involvement", or confaguration, is what matters true. However fires are more complex than that. Generally the wood frame isn't a source of fuel for the fire until later. The carpet and other furniture that is the same in all builds is likely to burn first. Not long after the wood frame is burning the steel frame absorbs enough heat to fail - but either way you really want to be out long before it gets that bad (and probably are dead if you are not)
> All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that.
You're right insofar as lots of improvements have been made to steel-and-concrete building fire safety since the 1970s. Plastics are sometimes still a problem.
It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days. The mills control for it now, but meanwhile everyone got used to the weird sizes and we're stuck with them because everyone centered on the shrunk sizes for tooling and standards. Pros know but it's a pain for DIYers.
> It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days.
That's just an old wives tale.
Lumber shrinks for money reasons, older lumber is bigger [1] with sequential revisions to the standard decreasing it's real size [2] [3] (the difference between 2in and 15/8in in strength is minimal however you can keep doing that math, and they did, to go down from 2in to 1.5in over a century).
Lumber shrinks, but not that much. There was NO standard and so mills just did what felt they could get away with calling a 2x4. Some mills did 2x4 was 2"x4", some did other sizes, it depending on how much they felt they could cheat vs how much they felt advertising the larger size would help. I have seen houses built in 1880 that used modern dimensions for 2x4s.
They claim that the change was driven by railroad shipping charges, and wasn't based on drying, but on pre-planing the rough lumber to reduce shipping cost. They further claim that in 1919 the US Dept. of Agriculture studied the issue and ended up defining a national standard for what the post-planed dimensions of a 2x4 should be. And they further claim that it took until the early 1960s to settle on a new standard that matches what we use today.
I've seen houses built in the late 1960s that used non-standard 2x4s, so I will dispute those facts. I don't remember details (and can't be bothered to look them up), but IIRC several different standards were tried before the current one finally took.
The pre-planing is a common claim, but I don't believe it. They can make lumber whatever size they want - of course they need to plane it, but they just make it larger to account for that. Still the planing excuse it one they like to use because it doesn't show "them" as trying to cheat us.
> In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?
I understand the origins of this. But I've never understood why we haven't moved on to actual sizing given the scale at which standardized lumber dimensions are produced
I'm just glad there is a standard. It doesn't matter much what size it is. What matters is that I can go to any lumber yard/mill when I need more and get it. What matters is that I and my inspector can look at (or more likely memorize!) some charts and be sure that everything is strong enough. Is actually 2"x4" lumber stronger than the standard sizes - yes, but most of the time it doesn't matter, and if it does I really want to step up to 2x6 (or something) because margin of safety is important when you get that close)
Here in NL stone is the traditional building material too, so it's not uncommon to see houses built of wood, but covered in a thin layer of "wallpaper" ("gevelbekleding") that's made of thin sides of real stone bricks. This way the houses look like regular brick houses, but are actually mostly made of wood. The brick-wallpaper means you don't need to paint all the time like in traditional wooden houses (eg in the Nordics), extra bonus. Personally I think it's a bit weird to build a house and fake the building material, but my only point is, you might have seen a lot more wooden houses than you knew!
> I never saw a house made a wood beside a ski chalet before
Maybe you need to get out more? In France (where I assume you live) new public buildings are mandated to be at least 50% wood or other bio-based renewables. Also ~5% (and increasing) of new domestic builds are timber framed.
I live in NeW Orleans. Where 90% of the housing stock is made of wood.
So the 5% French figures in 2025 confirm my impression. Most stuff are not made of wood in France.
Maybe it’s a language thing : when I say « made of wood » I mean that no stone are involved. There is no percentage. The whole frame is 2 by 4 from Home Depot.
I think this is sort of a more interesting question than the responses you got made it out to be.
Yes, of course, stone doesn’t really grow back on the timescales that we care about. Yes, stone not “bio” in any sense really.
But the goal of the law is not to make biology or geology points. It is to reduce the embodied carbon of new construction. I guess the determination was made that stone has some carbon cost… maybe it comes from the mining?
Or maybe they are trying to kickstart, specifically, a new industry in the field of growable construction material. Maybe they figure stone mining is already well developed tech anyway.
Isn't that just a matter of perspective? Most of the stone where I live is made of limestone which is from dead organisms. To the point that you can just break it open and find fossils throughout it.
That isn't renewable in the timeframe of humanity, but in the age of the universe it's renewable.
Good point, there are bio stones, but they are not renewable by our reference. But the vulcano stones are. And we have really lots of other stone underneath. No shortage of them. I would count them renewable.
Actually no. The situation that allowed that to happen, won't happen again in our biosphere. There are now microbes that break down decaying plant matter very quickly. So you won't ever get substantial amounts of oil being formed in the earth's crust.
I also took physical science courses in middle school. Just because new stones are formed within the earth's crust at some marginal rate does not mean that they are considered a renewable resource.
We're talking about stone in general. Volcanic stone is one type of stone, which does not cover all of the applications of stone as used in buildings, masonry and other industries today. I also specifically addressed volcanic stones in a sister comment.
Some rate of formation is not enough to satisfy the commonly held definition of renewable resources. Google "is stone a renewable resource" for a jumping off point.
I think that's pretty neat but lava stone is a very particular type of stone with particular properties, suited for specific applications, where as the typical stone you will see in masonry and building materials is not renewable.
That's a non-sequitur. Stone is not considered a renewable resource, which is typically defined as a resource which naturally replenishes itself over time at a meaningful rate compared to the rate of consumption.
My point is that "renewable resource" is a fairly meaningless term when applied to stone. Sure, we technically have a finite amount of it on the planet, but we also can't possibly use it all up. Not unless we have technology that would allow us to travel outside the solar system, at which point the limited amount of stone is also moot.
Sure, it doesn't fit the definition, but there is also no reason to care that it doesn't.
It's my assumption based on the fact that we continually mine new portions of the earth over time. Trees and other life exist within regenerative chemical cycles, whereas rock formation is a physical process that consumes some limited supply of material on Earth. I would love to know more about this as well, if you come across any resources.
We have concrete buildings going back to Greek and Roman times, mostly standing.
Wooden buildings have a very finite lifespan, and, aside from earthquakes, much less so in a disaster. A wooden city and a steel/brick/concrete city react very differently to firebombing.
Especially with declining populations, it makes sense to build structures to last. The old school brick/concrete/stone/... European buildings from 1500 are largely in good shape, at least where they weren't demolished by war.
Traditional European construction is also much more friendly for heating / cooling. The thermal capacity of stone-based materials helps a lot.
To me, it feels a bit like Germany banning nuclear power plants, and switching to Russian fossil fuels instead...
Drop a Google Streetview in the middle on downtown classical Gothenberg, and try to find a wood construction building. Sweden is about as northern Europe as it gets. Head over to Amsterdam, and it will look pretty similar.
It will be relatively similar to most other major European cities; solid masonry construction has historically been the norm.
You'll find some wooden houses in smaller towns and rural areas, but even there, if you head over to e.g. Poland, most things will be solid masonry. And the wooden construction is mostly relatively new; what you'll rarely find is old wooden construction.
I live in the northern part of Central Europe and have spent over a decade travelling through these countries. Ive worked with log and timber frame construction and have a solid understanding of traditional and modern building methods. I know how buildings are actually made, not just how they look on googles street view...
In Sweden around 80% of standing homes are wooden. About 90% of new single-family homes are timber construction. Gothenburg is an outlier because of 19th-century laws that limited wooden buildings to two storeys, which is why you get the Landshövdingehus with a brick base and wooden upper floors.
The Netherlands is western Europe, not northern or central. That’s basic geography...
Timber is the dominant material in residential construction across Sweden, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Denmark is more mixed, and Poland leans more towards masonry, but the south has a strong timber tradition, especially in the Tatra region.
And even in places like Germany or Denmark where it looks like brick, it's often just a clinker façade over a timber or frame structure. It’s aesthetic, not structural.
Honestly, it's laughable to compare the dense inner city to the massive volume of buildings outside it. You're looking at a fraction and pretending it's the whole. It’s just not serious.
Wood buildings can and have stood for hundreds of years, I'm in one right now. The ROI has been met after a few decades regardless of the material... at this point it becomes more economical to transport lighter materials that are easier to work with. Wood is also better for carbon storage as long as we're sourcing it sustainably. Concrete is one of the most carbon-intense materials out there.
What is "very finite" here? Where I grew up there are wood houses/barns/structures made entirely out of wood and still standing/being used after hundreds of years. Is that not enough?
Are you sure the facade isn't just stone, or do you use stone in interior walls? Most houses in NA are built of wood with a brick or stone facade. Some houses have a facade siding that can be anything from wood to cement board. Typically, the interior of the house is framed with wood or, in some cases, steel (mostly commercial).
The facade of a house or structure is usually tied into the framing so it doesn't fall over. Hence, brick ties are used to secure it to the wood or steel framing.
My uncle built his home from hardwood. No insulation. In sub freezing temps, you can put your hand in the wood and it isn't cold. Compared to my (poorly) insulated home, it b is significantly better.
That isn't a good way to measure because the inside of the house is warming up the walls. Hardwood is a poor insulator, but it is an insulator. If you touch wood it will feel warm, but it still loses a lot of heat compared to a properly insulated wall.
Yes, but if it's a much worse insulator, the extra heat transfer through studs might be more significant?
I'm not sure if it's been measured, but I imagine this densified wood would probably have at least twice the thermal conductivity of typical construction lumber, since naturally dense hardwoods already approach that.
So it seems like we'd basically need to replace 2x studs with 1x studs, assuming the same stud spacing, in order to match the thermal performance of a traditional wall.
I don't think this would be a dealbreaker at all though, one could always use continuous insulation instead of cavity insulation, which has a lot of benefits anyway. Maybe it can end up being a competitor to metal studs for commercial builds, at least.
If this just replaces steel beams or allows more post frame construction, the walls wouldn't change. Actually, if used in post frame style construction, it would allow for more space for insulation with less thermal bridging.
In modern construction we already put continuous insulation outside the 2x4 so that we don't have to deal with the studs and how much worse insulation they are.
I think that's the best practice, also for avoiding condensation, but isn't it pretty uncommon at least for residential builds in the US? Here in Washington, codes were recently changed to require continuous insulation, but I believe that's only with the prescriptive method. From what I've seen most builders seem to continue working around it and doing cavity insulation only.
Air has very low thermal conductivity, so for a lot of materials, thermal conductivity is primarily a function of how much air they contain and how it's structured (ideally in tiny pockets to minimize heat transfer through convection). Like spray foams, fiberglass insulation, etc are basically designed to hold air while minimizing convection.
I believe that's somewhat true of woods as well - different woods seem to range from 0.12-0.25 W/(mK) or so, which is somewhat less conductive than the underlying compounds like cellulose (0.4), thanks to the trapped air in wood.
It seems like densifying wood would mitigate the insulation contribution of trapped air, causing thermal conductivity to approache that of the underlying compounds like cellulose, though I'm not sure exactly what those compounds are with their process and how close they get to that air-free extreme.
if you dont make any other changes, it will have some detectable impact, but conductivity is linear with all of conductivity, depth, and area; and the other dimensions can also be changed like the screw diameter/pitch or the dimensions of the stud.
its very unlikely that this change will be an important consideration for house building or shopping though. theres simpler spots to reduce heat loss, like double paning your windows
"poor insulator", seems like an odd statement, but it's all relative I suppose. It's certainly better than the masonry or steel that this will replace. But if you take the air pockets out of it, then it's not going to be as good, but likely better than steel.
Steel, itself, is a material with a wide range of properties. In terms of tensile strength, which is the simplest kind of strength to measure, steel ranges from mild steel at 400 N/mm^2 to piano wire alloys at about 2500 N/mm^2. "Stronger than steel" is a flashy appellation that usually means you have just reached the bottom end.
A similar phenomenon occurs sometimes in papers about ceramics research. A very tough ceramic will often see a comparison of its fracture toughness to that of aluminium; as you've guessed, this usually refers to the toughness of pure unalloyed aluminium.
If that is the case, then I don't see any novelty here. This has been done for a long time. In Germany, this is called "Panzerholz" (something like "bulletproof wood")
Modern Panzerholz (Kunstharzpressholz, 'synthetic resin densified wood') is manufactured with resin - this new material doesn't seem to rely on resin, but only on the cellulose contained in the wood.
Same reason we don't build bridges out of titanium: panzerholz is more expensive than normal wood, and normal wood is good enough for most applications where it's used.
Titanium's strength is in its weight: steel's Young modulus is almost twice as high, so you'd have to build rather large bridges to compensate. Titanium is useful where weight is a concern, like things you launch into space. Steel is perfect whenever weight isn't a concern and sometimes still works really well because you get so much strength out of so little which is why there are so many fans of the thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames.
Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.
Those steel bike frames don't have much in common with the steel used for structural steel. They both are iron alloys with added carbon content, the similarity stops there.
Similarly trying to compare "titanium" to "steel" is dumb. No one uses pure titanium for structural purposes & there are hundreds of common steel alloys.
Please stop repeating this FUD. The notion that a rigid steel frame provides measurable shock absorbtion over the supple, air-filled, rubber tires is mind numbingly stupid.
Steel bikes feel “better” and “springier” than aluminum bikes. Objectively, they last longer than aluminum bikes.
What exact differences in physical properties or construction leads to this, I couldn’t tell you, but you can pick up an old steel bike frame for cheap and experience it yourself. Well-made steel frames are much lighter than poorly-made ones, so I would recommend finding one of the good ones.
No, I tried probably ten or fifteen of each type over a 35 year period.
There are a bunch of factors, including tube thickness, alloy (I’m sure that when it comes to steel this matters, I think it doesn’t matter with aluminum), and frame geometry.
One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, if you are using rim brakes, aluminum wheels are so much better than steel wheels it’s not even a conversation worth having. This is because aluminum wheels, unless they are painted, will have a nice aluminum oxide coating. This is effectively a ceramic and the coefficient of friction with rubber brake pads doesn’t change when the rims are wet, say on a rainy day. Steel rims lose all friction when wet.
Because I have been around for a while and made a lot of “experiments” (mistakes), I know some things. I’m happy to share what I know with you.
As you can see from Figure 3a at the top of the third page of the paper, this densified wood is about ten times the stiffness of natural wood, in the sense of Young's modulus. Stiffness is basically the product of Young's modulus and geometry, not geometry alone.
Oh man if that's true I hope it replaces dimensional lumber for floor joists. I'm not sure which psychopath invented span charts for home building, but it's extremely rare I'm in a non-slab house where the cabinets and such don't rattle from just a normal person walking across the floor!
I ended up putting beams in to half the span across my own house because it got so annoying(I want to say they are high grade SYP 2x10s @ 13 or 14')
Liangbing Hu at UMD, checks out. Fantastic find! This should at least be the top comment on this thread to offset the content-free journalist pablum that's linked.
The strength is 483–587 MPa, I seem to see when skimming, which is indeed superior to ASTM A36 structural steel (250MPa yield strength). In Extended Data Figure 1c, they reported the density as 1.3g/cc, a sixth of the density of steel. (Extended data figure 2f plots density against lignin removal percentage.) Of course high-strength steels are stronger, but not six times stronger.
As for the process, they didn't just boil the wood; they boiled it with lye (2.5M, the "food industry chemical") and sodium sulfite (0.4M, technically also a food industry chemical, used for example as an antioxidant in wine) for 7 hours before densifying it with 5MPa for "about a day", removing optimally 45% of the lignin. This is similar to the sulfite chemical wood pulping process that preceded the Kraft paper process, just carried out at high pH and not taken to completion, so in a sense I guess the result is sort of like Masonite, which is also made from cellulose fibers from wood bonded with the wood's natural lignin.
Environmental concerns may be an obstacle; sulfite pulping is nasty. Also presumably to mass-produce the stuff they'll want to find ways to shorten the cycle time, and maybe already have.
The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago. Sulfite pulping was going gangbusters, building materials were booming, environmental concerns were largely unknown, and there was a rage for everything newfangled, modern, and "scientific". The scientific discipline of strength of materials, needed to calculate the benefits, was already well developed. Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929, with a process involving autoclaving wood chips at 2800kPa. So what prevented someone from selling Superwood back then? Did nobody try partial alkaline sulfite pulping and pressing the result?
> The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago
> Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929
Thank you for taking into consideration that for us readers, 1890 was 135 years ago. Just so you know, people from this era haven't started writing 4-digit years with the leading zero yet.
> established in 1996 ... The Long Now Foundation hopes to "creatively foster responsibility" in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[2] (e.g., by writing the current year "02025" rather than "2025"). The organization's logo is X, a capital X with an overline, a representation of 10,000 in Roman numerals.
I appreciate that people have started to think about this already, but could I propose an alternative system. Borrowed from Warhammer 40k The Long Now was founded in 998.M1.
It's a little jarring at first, but that would easily get us to the 999th Mellenium and wouldn't be too hard to reference BCE dates as 005.M-0
error: invalid digit "8" in octal constant
error: invalid digit "9" in octal constant
But why only one leading zero? You can show you care somewhat more about the future by writing 002025, but then someone comes along and writes 000002025 ...
Part of the strength is from Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNCs), which are modern (mid-01900's) and still being heavily researched. I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc
My daughter recently started researching extracting/converting CNCs from fabric blends (currently cotton/elastane like spandex). Reading this post made me wonder if we can then remake fabric from CNCs, strong against knives or bullets?
> I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc
This all sounds very interesting if you have any links!
The conference was International Symposium on Green Chemistry [1], here's a previous HN comment I made [2], and here's a quick Dropbox-dump of my non-personal pics from there [3].
Many of the slides aren't available yet, but I'll try to curate some from photos. I'll put photo number from Dropbox, since they make direct-linking hard.
Photo 62 to 67 shows the H2O2 work from Mark Andrews' lab at McGill, being commercialized by a company called Anomera.
Photo 8 and 9 has a Cyrene whitepaper from Merck/Sigma-Aldrich. They did have presentations about it, but I don't have notes, will try to get from my daughter as she wants to try it for her process.
Photo 16 has a revisualized Periodic table of elements, logarithmically scaled by availability and color-coded with scarcity / conflict / need. We only have 100 years of Indium left and that was sorta worthless >20 years ago and now used in every touchscreen. had photo but put source link instead [4]
Photo 2 shows that we are now man-making stuff at a greater rate than the earth is creating stuff and that is rapidly increasing. The point there was that we will keep doing this, so we need to make it sustainable and circular. Photo 5 shows how FUBAR'd we are.
Happy to try to answer other questions, but noting I'm not a chemist but a chaperone, so I'll have to ask other people.
Apparently it's not just me who thinks when someone says "food processing chemicals" that "hey, lye is food processing chemical too" - used to industrially peel mandarins. Weaselwording to make things sound benign.
The antibacterial properties of penicillin had been discovered many times before it was eventually realized what a big deal it was in 1940 (Howard Florey's role is much more important than Flemings' for that reason).
So it's entirely possible that the process was found, and discarded straight away because they didn't realize how cool their invention was.
That's one possibility. Another is that it has a critical drawback; Masonite siding resulted in a massive class-action lawsuit verdict due to moisture damage (though the researchers say Superwood is less vulnerable) and it occurs to me that maybe structural steel's plastic deformation when overloaded as a construction material is somewhat more forgiving than the brittle fracture behavior typical of wood and evident in the photos of their ballistic testing.
That it has a fatal flaw is indeed a possibility, but I don't think it could be the reason why it hasn't been invented sooner: if anything, we are detecting these kinds of flaws way faster than we used to, so it's likely that in the past it would have been produced at scale long before we found the problem, and given that consumer laws were nonexistent back then, it could have been kept on the market long after the flaw had been found, as long as it is economical enough to produce.
I see. a brief google search didn't bring up anything in relation to the leading zero concept, but that helps. at a brief glance, their use of the leading zero seems like ... clever marketing?
my analysis of it is that it's a way of making people wonder "oh why is he writing it like that?" like I did, lead them to the foundation, and have them engage with it and be aware of it in the future; i.e. marketing. it's quite clearly not a practical thing. the probability that by the time 10000AD rolls around we're still using the same year system, we're still alive as a species, we're still technologically capable as a species, and we don't have the capacity to understand older years minus the leading zero seems near enough zero to be zero. call it what you like, marketing, inspiration, whatever, but it's a sneaky way of leading people's thoughts onto a particular pathway, which I call marketing
to be clear, having read through their website, I think what they're doing is great, and this isn't a criticism
I was born in the 20th century. I was filling out a medical form and put my birth year in with 2 digits. The web app took that to mean just the 2 digits. No, I wasn't born in AD 70.
That's the kind of programming that makes you reluctant to put anything into it.
Not using leading zeros seems fine if you're using AD near it to indicate that it's not 1942.
Why does Long Now not recommend more than one leading zero. The universe is ~13.7 billion years old and is expected to last more than 100,000 years. Heck, Homo sapiens have been around for more than 100,000 years.
Why use fixed length decimals at all? Why not just store the date with sufficient bits and render it with as many decimals as required? 9998, 9999, 10000. Not an issue.
There are problems we absolutely should be thinking ahead 8000 years to solve for (or help mitigate)– climate change, species protections, sustainability, etc.
Call me skeptical, but reformatting dates for a "bug" in 8000 years seems extraordinarily silly. To think humanity will likely be using the same time measurement systems, computers that operate remotely similarly to ours today, same written/spoken languages, etc is laughable.
8000 years ago, the entire world's human population was roughly equal to that of London today and still just figuring out agriculture.
Even in passing comments in the 'year of the clock' 02025 to some forum? So the idea is that the computing systems in the YotC 12025 parsing hackernews from a 10000 years prior would experience a "bug" when encountring 4 digit dates?
You know, back in 01999 we were sticking representation of dates into these bit sized 'registers'. Certainly hope by the time we hit 10000 CE "long term thinking" has made significant inroards in the field of information processing ..
The real bug being addressed is not a technical bug but a societal and cultural bug. Writing the 0 in front is a reminder that the present moment is just the beginning and that behavior that benefits us in the short term may cause problems in the long term.
Total layman but I assumed that lignin was the molecule that was actually making the wood hard ? How does removing it improves hardness ? Why is there an optimal amount ?
As for the reason it wasn't my wild guess would be that they were already mining for coal so it may have been more economical to just dig the ground with quasi-slaves rather than having more competition on the wood resource and waiting for it to boil whereas you can just produce steel bar by the kilometer in a factory.
Labor is a necessary component of the finished goods. Therefore its source, cost, availability, and "externalities" relative to competing formulations is indeed relevant.
Yes, but the situation they describe, where mining was cheaper than today, would not be sufficient to explain the non-adoption of this process at the time, even if it were true.
> Removing some lignin allows you to compact the wood more.
Yes, lignin puffs up the wood, when some of it is removed by boiling and then heated up and pressed at the same time, carbon molecules bond with each other exponentially more.
I was researching this subject two - three years back. Anything that needs to be able to move at some point, benefits a lot by being 6 times lighter. Also buildings are always constrained by their weight when trying to make them as tall as possible.
I'd argue that it is to the point insofar as the price of labor is important to the competitiveness of a finished product, isn't it so ?
I think your response stems from the fear of me trying to turn this into something "political" but it seems to me that going down the mine has been really hard work and low pay for most of History. I am pretty sure that most historians would agree that mining is one of the easiest use of slave labor (go down the mine and bring back the stuff failing which you will be punished, also no skills required) from the point of view of slave owner/manager that is. I am also sure they would agree that after the abolition of slavery, you could consider a big chunk of mine workers, quasi slaves. Hell, even today, mining is one of the main use for drug-addicted labor force in Myanmar and child labor in Congo.
Our ancestors in the 1800s worked under conditions we find atrocious, because that was the best work they could get. Not because they were some kind of slaves.
By 2025 standards, the 1890s were a time of extreme poverty, low technology, and medical ignorance. Life was short and hard, but also much better than a century earlier.
In a century, people will hopefully say the same about our time.
It was only the best work they could get because they had been forced out of the countryside by cost increases, automation, and centralization of land ownership. They teach about the enclosure of the fields in schools for a reason: what had once been communal property of villages throughout England became the exclusive property of the nobility. By and large, if people had a choice they preferred to remain a peasant: you lived in the countryside, breathed clean air, stayed close to the friends, family, and community you were raised with, were self-sufficient, had space and time to raise a family, worked on your own schedule (at least day-to-day), didn't have to let some 'boss' treat you like a slave, didn't have to fear being 'fired', so on and so forth.
To quote an economist (Branko Milanovic) who's done work on this topic in the context of 19th century Serbia attempting to industrialize their peasant population:
> All contemporary evidence points to the fact that peasants were not at all keen to move to cities and work for a wage. Since there was no landlessness very few people were pushed by poverty to look for city jobs. Political parties which strongly (and understandably) represented peasantry further limited mobility of labor by guaranteeing homestead (3.5 ha of land, house, cattle, and the implements) which could not be alienated, neither in the case of default on a loan nor in the case of overdue taxes.
> This situation was very typical for the late industrializers in South-East Europe. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia were all overwhelmingly agricultural with small peasant landholdings and no landlessness. All displayed slow or arrested capitalist development and half-hearted urbanization. The reason was simple: farmers had no incentive to move from being self-employed to being hired labor. And who would prefer to switch from being one’s own boss and dependent perhaps only on the elements to become a hired hand, working six days a week all year round, in “satanic mills”?
> ...
> The question is, how do you industrialize under such conditions? Reluctance of peasants, whenever they had their own land, to become industrial workers has been discussed (Gerschenkron, Polanyi). In England they had to be literally chased from land through enclosures; in France, the process was much more overdrawn and took a century; in Germany, Poland and Hungary, large estates owned by nobility and consequent landlessness did the job. In Russia, it was bloody and occurred through forced collectivization.
> ...
> The process whereby agricultural economies industrialized was wrenching. The displacement and unhappiness of the population dragged into industrial centers through either empty stomachs or outright terror was incomparable in its human costs to today’s similar transfer of labor from manufacturing to services (or to unemployment). The transformation in the underlying economic structure is never easy but it seems to me that the one from the fresh air and freedom of own farm to being a cog in a huge soiled machine of industrialization was the most painful.
Being "forced out of" work by automation is how we have progressed during the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution. It continues today.
Fewer people can produce as much food as before, so the people not needed for food production can start producing other things.
This can of course be a tragedy for the people left without work, but for society at a macro level it is hugely beneficial.
This era in England has a bad reputation, and by our standards it was awful, but by objective measures like average lifespan, population size and technological progress, it was a time of unprecedented progress and material improvement for common people.
Did people lose a sense of community as they left their ancestral villages. Probably, and I don't know how to weigh that against our immense wealth today.
Why do we demand that the price of progress be paid by those people least able to pay? Why is it that the people who work, who produce everything that we rely on to survive, are also the ones who suffer, whose life-plans are upended, whose homes are taken away, whose bodies are mangled -- while the rich, who contribute little other than "management of capital", are fine and dandy?
If someone were to say to you, today, that your career was over, and that the only choice was to go work in a mine -- and moreover, that thanks to the great pressure of unemployed laborers in the same boat as you, safety standards had fallen by the wayside? Would you consider that a "necessary cost" for progress? If not, then what's the bar? When do you consider it acceptable to tell someone, who trained for years and years to do something useful for the community, that due to technological developments on the other side of the continent they need to find a new job, slash their budget, abandon their home, give up plans of having a family?
It's easy to say "they should learn to code" -- wait, but now coding's not the place to be, is it? The rate at which these shifts happen has accelerated, continues to accelerate, and is already well past the ability of people to re-skill mid-career.
We already have enough resources to feed and house every person in the US (and the world, though I admit the logistics there are a bit tougher). If automation actually meant that the broader population -- no, not their hypothetical grandchildren -- would become more prosperous, perhaps it would be something worth celebrating. But as is, growth for the sake of growth, at the cost of suffering that could easily be avoided had we a different economic system, seems hard to justify in my eyes.
There was a inventor in Germany which got featured in a science show on television, which did something similar. He build a big pressure cooker where he placed the wood and a liquid mixture inside and let it cook for many hours. The wood got soak through completely, which gave it, as he claimed, resistance against rotting at every layer. For outdoor appliances the wood would not need any coating and not deteriorate.
There was no mention about the hardness, but he also didn’t press it.
InventWood's research paper mentions not just boiling, but boiling it with an "aqueous mixture of NaOH and Na2SO3", which also helps with "partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose".
That seems to really only provide benefits in use cases where weight isn't an issue, since this is conceptually just taking out air and adding more wood into the same amount of space to increase strength.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but almost all use cases for wood rely on it to be somewhat light, for which the lattice structure is already fairly ideal.
No, density is doubled, but strength is increased 11×, according to the paper. Sandwich panels with strong, stiff face sheets will always beat relatively homogeneous material like natural wood for the kinds of applications you are talking about.
Oh interesting, then it laminating thin sheets of this should be far lighter for the same strength, I didn't expect the strength increase to be anywhere near 2x much less 11x.
in Finland they seem to have a similar method, where they bake the wood (they don't press it), the wood is then stable against rot and pests. please note: don't experiment with your oven at home, it will be unusable afterwards (because of the evaporating resins)
MDF includes some binders, but is essentially this. Doubt the glue-free version would stick together well, but maybe.
The sawdust planks wouldn't have the properties of the long-grain wood fiber planks though. The fibers that make up natural wood are what makes the wood tough.
This is kind of how plywood is made - take wood chips and glue and press them together. I feel it wouldn't work well with sawdust, even with the chemical and heat+pressure process, since there would be little natural cohesion between the particles (larger pieces = more strength, up until you have entire logs/boards).
Large chips glued together is Oriented Strand Board (OSB). Small chips glued together is Particle Board. Sawdust glued together is Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF). Plywood is layers of veneer--thin sheets of wood--glued together in alternating orientations.
Plywood can be nice. It doesn't expand with temperature changes like planks and doesn't have a grain direction that it can split along.
The others, I hate. Any small amount of moisture and they delaminate. OSB is so ugly and rough that you need to hide it because you'll never be able to apply enough primer to cover the chip pattern. I'd rather just use regular plywood at that point. Particle board is the same, but I'm okay with the kind coated on both sides with melamine. It's pretty hard to get a much flatter surface than melamine particle board without spending ridiculously more on granite.
But MDF is the worst. A lot of people like MDF because it's easy to work and can be fairly structural, if you use it right. But it's very, very easy to damage, has absolutely zero edge strength, and it makes a super-fine, extremely carcinogenic sawdust that is extremely difficult to clean up completely. Yes, all sawdust is carcinogenic, always wear a mask in the wood shop, but MDF sawdust never goes away.
Frankly, it's just easier to get a bunch of sheets of birch plywood and southern pine dimensional lumber shipped direct to my house and not worry about it.
probably not. This does not work by adding a binder, like a plastic. This process softens the wood and then compresses it. I'm not sure that doing that with sawdust would give you enough tensile strength.
And there are only smaller comparisons towards steel. They are more focused on how it compares to regular wood.
In summary, what they are doing: 1. Boil the wood. 2. Press the wood. 3. Done.