• Lvxferre
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    6 months ago

    Misleading name, on the same level as calling water “non-explosive hydrogen”. That said the material looks promising, as a glass replacement for some applications (the text mentions a few of them, like armoured windows).

    (It is not a metal; it’s a ceramic, mostly oxygen with bits and bobs of aluminium and nitrogen. Interesting nonetheless, even if I’m picking on the name.)

    • hansl@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      TBF in the Star Trek universe they also do get transparent aluminum earlier than stopping the wars.

    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 months ago

      That would be the hydrogen bomb. If we created a sizeable MIRV of cobalt bombs and pointed them at Jerusalem on an automated system that tracked the rate of violent death, suddenly all the religious types would get really polite.

      (Obviously this is a supervillain example. we’re considering alternative vectors towards peace and humanitarian aid in the holy land before holding it hostage. We’re also running out of saner ideas.)

      (Also, the Soviet Union did consider a doomsday device a la Dr. Strangelove as a cold war nuclear deterrent before the politburo decided it would never authorize a retalitory strike for sake of the species and moved on to Мирное сосуществование. Nearly eighty years without a nuclear war shows us even religious fanatics and madmen don’t want to extinct the human species. Their heart’s not in it.)

      The problem is, smaller interests can’t get the bomb yet. It takes too much complex industry to make. As a result, we still have huge swaths of powerless population to be bullied, enslaved and exploited.

      Once the superweapon made from fir wood, Indian ocean tuna, granite and parafin becomes public we’ll have to negotiate with even the smallest faction and arrange for the welfare and contentment of everyone… that is if we survive the intermediary tensions. Our plutocrats may choose extinction over giving up their power.

      • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        Once the superweapon made from fir wood, Indian ocean tuna, granite and parafin becomes public we’ll have to negotiate with even the smallest faction and arrange for the welfare and contentment of everyone…

        Don’t worry, biological weapons get easier to make every day!

    • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      In that respect, I suppose it’s more on the Star Wars track, where “transparisteel” is used on the TIE fighter windows.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    3 times as tough as steel and they’re making bulletproof glass out of it…

    There’s a low budget pc game about colonizing Mars and this was one of the things in the tech tree

    Crazy to see it as a real thing now.

    Like OG aluminum, this is going to be crazy expensive at first, but in a century it’ll likely be cheap and we’ll see it replacing glass in the most mundane uses.

    We’ll see it replace phone screens pretty quickly tho. A few mm’s of this and we’ll have legitimately unbreakable screens, and even if a scratch happens, you should be able to just buff it out. They’re probably wrap entire phones it honestly. One solid piece that makes repair impossible on your own.

    • BreakDecks
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      6 months ago

      Might be hard to assemble the functional part of a phone inside of a crystal, and you can’t bake the whole thing because silicon isn’t surviving 2000oC for 2 days.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Yeah, but it was a lot harder to make regular aluminum back in the day as well.

        Increasing ductility isn’t impossible, but it probably is unlikely in this case.

        But two halves that get glued/sealed together permanently would be possible.

      • MetaRobert
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        6 months ago

        That, yes, and and I’m pretty sure we’ll not be polishing scratches out either.

      • physicswizard
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        6 months ago

        Good question. This new material is technically a ceramic, not a metal, so I’d be inclined to say no. But we’d need more information on its electrical properties to say for sure.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Like OG aluminum, this is going to be crazy expensive at first, but in a century it’ll likely be cheap and we’ll see it replacing glass in the most mundane uses.

      I doubt that it’s ever going to be super affordable, or be used in something as common as a phone. The price constraints on aluminum were due to the amount of energy it takes to produce. The transparent aluminum is a bit more complicated.

      From the article it appears the fabrication is mold dependent, which always increases production cost. So you have to fabricate a mold for any new component. You then have to then pressurize the powder at 15k pounds per square inch, and then heat aluminum powders at 2000 degrees Celsius for 2 days.

    • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      wouldnt that stop the radio waves from reaching the phone, like a faraday cage?

  • library_napper@monyet.cc
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    6 months ago

    The obtained material, which is molded and opaque, is heated to 2000 C and kept at this temperature for two days

    Fuck that’s a long time and a high temp

  • BakedCatboy
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    6 months ago

    Transparent aluminum is so weird, a piece of it was once passed around our office. It felt heavier and colder than I expected, which I guess is probably because it’s much denser than most types of glass (I think it’s only comparable to optical glass so it would be close to holding a high quality glass lens) and it looks like the thermal conductivity is way higher.

    • ZerushOP
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      6 months ago

      No, Glass has an amorph atomic structure, its tecnically an ultra dense liquid, metal always has a cristaline structure, way different, even in it’s transparent form, Saphires and Rubies are also tecnically transparent Aluminium.

      • BakedCatboy
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        6 months ago

        What do you mean no? Everything I said is true - I’m just describing my firsthand impression. Nowhere did I say transparent aluminum is a type of glass? I was just describing why it feels heavier and colder than you would expect since it looks like glass, of which most are less dense and less thermally conductive compared to transparent aluminum, which is not glass but makes sense to compare to in order to convey what handling a piece feels like.

    • OhmsLawn@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Thanks for that. Really cool stuff.

      “Aluminum oxynitride ceramics have been around since the 1980s, so it’s not new stuff by any means.”

      Says it costs 5X the price of standard bulletproof glass, but that it’s far stronger, and IR-transparent. Cool material.

    • blargerer@kbin.social
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      6 months ago

      This one goes the other way. It was first patented in the 80s before the movie came out. It just wasn’t a big thing yet. I assume it’s had improved properties since then, but the process already existed.

      • meco03211@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Unfortunately this is a time travel paradox. It wouldn’t have even been patented if the crew hadn’t gone back in time and needed it to transport a whale back to the future. I fully support the claim that Star Trek did it first in the future.

    • ZerushOP
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      6 months ago

      The StarTrek episode with the transparent Aluminium was from 1986, transparent Aluminium was invented in 1985, but at this time they don’t have the tecnologic measures to produce significant ammounts. Even today it’s relative expensive to produce, ~$15 per Square inch.

    • Ultragramps@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 months ago

      I wonder if anyone will ever tell him about the “rose gold” trend that he kept calling purple gold. He really put a lot of effort in that one and it makes him seem isolated, in that there was no point in the creation of the video where the search for ‘purple gold’ could be revised to ‘rose gold’ and garner less clickbait attention like patents that have been circumvented.
      Edit: I would’ve suggested blue gold to clarify the intermetallic nature over being strictly an alloy.

      • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        Except it’s not clickbait - I’ll cite Wikipedia so you can look yourself, but they’re not the same thing.

        Rose Gold is a proper alloy of Gold, made with Copper.

        Purple Gold is an “intermetalic” (which have a different molecular structure to normal alloys and thus are more brittle), and is made with Aluminium.

        Due to it’s brittleness even amongst intermetalics, it is considered hard to work with, much more so than a proper alloy like Rose Gold. The only similarity they share is their colour ranges can overlap dependent on how they’re made.

      • BloodSlut@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        rose gold is different, its made with copper and sometimes silver and looks copper-like, not purple

      • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        You could have said nothing and we would think better of you. But now that this is out here, we know you don’t know what you’re talking about and it stains your image.

        The video shows the recipe for purple gold and details the problems with it as an alloy. It is also distinctly different from Rose Gold in process, recipe, and outcome. Why are you so oblivious to the obvious?

        • Ultragramps@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 months ago

          You sound mad at the world. I know I wasn’t the original who harmed you, but damned if I don’t feel like him. Try your best, it didn’t work this time, though.
          Would you like to know more?

          • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Neat. How does that apply? You provide a link but say nothing about how it helps you. Since you have shown a lack of critical understanding, it’s going to be amusing seeing you link the wiki article for Intermetallics into your argument that rose gold is the same as purple gold. Are you just abstracting the process from a high level understanding, like “tHeY eRR aLLoiS!” or do you have an actual valid point?

  • oxjox
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    6 months ago

    FWIW, this has been around for about twenty years.

    • JustMy2c@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Yeah of course, they learned it in the eighties to be able to rescue some whales I think…

    • ZerushOP
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      6 months ago

      Since 1985, one year before this StarTrek episode. But until now not producible in bigger scale.

    • sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      The original discoverer of the element spelled it “aluminum”. The British publisher that published his work changed the spelling. The rest of the world got the right version of the man’s work. The Brits are wrong.

      • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        It’s only the US and Canada that use “aluminum” though isn’t it? The rest of the world and most languages have it as “-ium”.
        Humphrey Davey actually changed his mind and changed it to “-ium” shortly after discovering it.
        Also, IUPAC has “Aluminium” as the primary spelling, though both are acceptable.

      • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        The rest of the world got the right version of the man’s work

        Which is (or at least should be) “Aluminium” because that’s the internationally agreed IUPAC spelling.

        We gave up the cooler spelling of Sulfur to be consistent with IUPAC - if we can do that, then surely giving up on “-num” should be a cakewalk.