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Comment by westurner | Hacker News Reader

> "Aerogel from fruit biowaste produces ultracapacitors with high energy density and stability" (2020) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X1...

Years ago, I remember reading about supercapacitor electrodes made from what would be waste hemp bast fiber. They used graphene as a control. And IIRC, the natural branching structure in hemp (the strongest natural fiber) was considered ideal for an electrode.

"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast" https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/hemp-carbon-ma...

How do the costs and performance compare? Graphene, hemp, durian, jackfruit

While graphene production costs have fallen due to lots of recent research, IIUC all graphene production is hazardous due to graphene's ability to cross the lungs and the blood-brain barrier?

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All my life, I've heard people go on and on about the magical properties of hemp.

It's hilarious.

They have these material science level arguments about hemp, yet the same people would be hard pressed to find an alternative use for cotton aside from clothes, or wood pulp aside from ikea furniture.

It's a desert topping, it's a driveway sealant. And the government won't let us have it!

Hemp textiles are rough, but antimicrobial/antibacterial: hemp textiles resist growth of pneumonia and staph.

AFAIU, when they blend hemp with e.g. rayon it's good enough for underwear, sheets, scrubs.

The government is getting the heck out of the way of hemp, a great rotation crop that can be used for soul remediation.

> soul remediation.

That's the best pun - or typo - that I've seen in a while.

Maybe a freudian slip

#AccidentalArt.

(Freudian psychoanalytic projections are not supported by neuroimaging)

I was recently reading a book about Thomas Edison and it mentioned how he sent people all around the world searching for plant fibers that they could use as the filament in light bulbs. IIRC, they settled on a type of bamboo because the structure of the fibers were particularly conducive to their purposes.

damn if hemp doesn't make a come back.. from cbd to ultracaps..

Hopefully but it’s only been legal to grow hemp in the US since 2018. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/13/18139678/cbd-indust...

Technically, the 2013 farm bill (signed into law in 2014) authorized growing hemp for state-registered research purposes. https://www.votehemp.com/laws-and-legislation/federal-legisl...

Turns out UC Berkeley's got an approach for brewing cannabinoids (and I think terpenes) from yeast, and a company in Germany has a provisional patent application to brew cannabinoids from bacteria. We could be absorbing carbon ("sequestering" carbon) and coal ash acid rain with mostly fields of industrial hemp for which there are indeed thousands of uses.

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