[kragen]

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?

[dotancohen]

  > 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.

[cpach]

“Just so you know, people from this era haven't started writing 4-digit years with the leading zero yet.”

People have been doing that since at least 01998.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128020723/http://longnow.or...

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

> 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.

---

They zero pad, but it doesn't seem like anyone else does so with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

[MadVikingGod]

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

[foobarian]

They look to me like zip codes or octal numbers before I think of years. :-)

[Polizeiposaune]

Except:

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 ...

[dotancohen]

It is extremely disingenuous to present a tiny fringe group that represents not a percent of a percent of the population as something "people do".

[cpach]

I never claimed it is a wide-spread practice.

[neomantra]

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?

[ghostly_s]

> 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!

[neomantra]

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.

[1] https://www.isgc-symposium.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974375

[3] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/5u8xmvcxv5x1zyzaq0jxu/APJPtEo...

[4] https://www.euchems.eu/euchems-periodic-table/

[happosai]

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.

[Maarten88]

> why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago

Maybe because at that time tropical hardwood was readily available at low cost?

[kragen]

Tropical hardwood is weaker than structural steel rather than twice as strong.

[nine_k]

IIRC wood processed for strength was used in aviation until 1940s, so maybe somehow similar processes were known.

I suspect that the problem us, as usual, in the price. Also possibly with the high anisotropy of the material

[littlestymaar]

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.

[kragen]

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.

[littlestymaar]

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.

[rascul]

I've worked with masonite too many times. That stuff is garbage and doesn't belong anywhere near a house.

[permo-w]

why are you making the choice to place leading zeroes on your years?

[kilpikaarna]

I appreciate this quirk as a way to quickly recognize and know to pay extra attention to his invariably top-quality posts.

[kragen]

Aw, thanks!

blushes

[PaulRobinson]

He'll have the last laugh when Y10K rolls around...

[sharken]

Indeed, but it's almost 8.000 years until that happens, so to me it just looks unnecessary and distracting.

[is_true]

It's for your descendants, so theirs LLMs are more accurate.

[permo-w]

if they work the same way as now, then they'd be less accurate, using two different tokens for the same meaning

[C4stor]

Probably adoption of the "long now" foundation style ?

[permo-w]

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?

[C4stor]

Their home page first sentence states : "The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking."

So I don't know if the concept is explained in more details elsewhere, but I think it's clearly an integral part of their communication.

[permo-w]

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

[LorenDB]

We already refer to years in the first millennium AD without leading zeros, e.g. AD 42 or AD 385.

[mmooss]

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.

[yubblegum]

> 01890 .. 01929

curious: What's with the funky date notation? Is this the new cool thing?

[evanb]

> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

https://longnow.org/about/

[mr_toad]

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.

[biker142541]

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.

[evanb]

It's really about the broader lesson, to emphasize that we're just at the beginning of history and that we might benefit from long-term thinking.

[yubblegum]

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 ..

[evanb]

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.

[tasuki]

This is just stupid. What bug?

We still write year 476 as 476. We don't have to write 0476 to prevent confusing it with 1476. It's not confusing.

[evanb]

As I mention in a response to a sibling post, it's really about the broader lesson of long-term thinking about the far future.

[zokier]

> This should at least be the top comment on this thread to offset the content-free journalist pablum that's linked.

The posted Techcrunch article directly links to the Nature paper, it is the very first link of the article

[cassepipe]

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.

[kragen]

Removing some lignin allows you to compact the wood more. If you remove too much the wood falls apart when you try to compact it.

I think that your critique of Gilded Age exploitative labor practices is not to the point.

[jonathaneunice]

Labor is a necessary component of the finished goods. Therefore its source, cost, availability, and "externalities" relative to competing formulations is indeed relevant.

[kragen]

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.

[emporas]

> 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.

[cassepipe]

Thank you for your response.

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.

[BurningFrog]

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.

[achierius]

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.

[BurningFrog]

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.