Transparent wood could soon find uses in smartphone screens, insulated windows | Hacker News Reader

Transparent wood could soon find uses in smartphone screens, insulated windows

arstechnica.com

185 pointspseudolus140 comments

Transparent wood is cool, but imho it's a solution in search for a problem. As the article explains, you basically remove the lignin, bleach it, and fill in the spaces with epoxy. What you get is neither as clear as pure epoxy or glass, nor as environmentally friendly as wood since now it's more plastic than wood by weight.

The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible. But then you have to deal with the visible wood structure, and colors won't be as vibrant as they would be with a glass screen.

Wood is a carbon sink, if you look at the page of Woodoo, one of the startups mentioned in the article, sustainability seems to be a key pitch.

I wouldn't be surprised if turning a piece of wood transparent would have orders of magnitude more carbon footprint than just burning it.

What is the carbon footprint of the glass that it replaces, and the lifetime lower costs of heating / cooling because of lower thermal conductivity?

This isn't a simple "cost of process to make it vs amount of C related if burnt".

And there are efforts to make glass lower carbon footprint too ( https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-glass-cuts-carbo... )

https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/2019%20Fl... is what its competing against.

> Flat or float glass plants (NAICS 327211) operate high temperature furnaces that melt siliceous minerals and other materials to produce glass typically used in windows, glazing, and windshields. Glass manufacturing is energy intensive and a significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the industrial sector. Emissions from plants producing flat glass are the largest source of GHG emissions in the manufacturing lifecycle of products made with flat glass. In 2019, 22 flat glass plants reported direct emissions of 2.95 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Emissions from these plants represent nearly 70% of total direct emissions from flat glass industry.

One advantage of glass is that it's infinitely recyclable.

Wood+epoxy is probably a nightmare to recycle and will just end up in dumps and further contributing to the microplastic problem our world faces. Maybe it's fine. Maybe in 50 years we'll look back on the idea the same way we would if somebody made walls and phone parts of wood mixed with asbestos and lead.

For the recyclability of glass - absolutely. But when we're dealing with windows for houses, while they are recyclable, we're not talking about the glass bottle cycle (wine bottles, beer bottles, soda bottles), but rather windows that tend to be on the 10 year (or longer) length of time.

The recyclability of the house that I currently reside in (different house) has windows that are at least 40 years old (and possibly some that are at least 80). The most recent ones were some done about 20 years ago, and I've got no intention of replacing them (they work quite well).

Glass is recyclable and I wholly advocate its use for bottles and the like.

But how old are the windows in your house? When you replace them - will they be recycled or thrown out with other structural construction waste? When your garage door gets replaced (that's 30 years old), will you separate out the three one foot square windows from that top panel and send that separately to the recycling center? Or will it all get tossed in the large garbage hauler?

I'm not saying that this is good, but rather that the use case for glass (or similar material) for a window in construction tends to have a different life cycle than the wine bottle.

Burn it in a high temperature oven

I was replying to wood being a carbon sink being relevant. You are right that the point of comparison should be on the whole process on both sides. Wood being a carbon sink is a component in that, but I doubt that it's hugely relevant.

That quote about absolute emissions doesn't tell me much. The link has a much more useful metric: ~0.55 tons of CO2 per ton of produced flat glass. This is the number that a new process is competing with.

Another consideration is longevity. The rate of amortization acts as a multiplier for carbon footprint. It's hard to compete with glass in this area too.

What about the resin though? It’s not recyclable (or décomposable) surely?

Yes, they call out that glass has a lower end-of-life impact, eg glass turns into sand.

A biodegradable window in a building wouldn't be much use, you'd have to replace it constantly each time it rotted away. Except maybe in a very dry climate.

I suppose you could paint it, if we also had transparent paint. Well, there are lacquers.

Biodegradation is very much a function of conditions. Wood is biodegradable, but a well built house can avoid biodegradation for hundreds of years. Wood-framed windows are just fine with, in my experience, two caveats:

1. Rainwater needs to drain, even from gnarly little spaces like where the glass meets the wood. If the exterior wood is painted, then the paint needs to be maintained.

2. Interior humidity can and will condense onto the glass if the interior dewpoint is higher than the surface temperature. This can be hard to avoid in cold climates, especially if there are insulating window coverings over the glass. That condensation can drip onto the wood frame. (And, worse, could go through it into the wall cavity. It’s rather rare for the inside of a wall to be waterproofed and flashed like the outside ought to be.)

If I were building in a cold climate, I would stick with moisture-insensitive window frames. (Although aluminum, which can be quite pretty, has terrible thermal performance.)

Yeah, I'm familiar with these issues, living in a 70-year-old hardwood framed and clad house with decaying paint in a wet climate. I'm renovating it gradually.

> The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible

I'm not sure I buy that, there's lots of materials that are more transparent than this "transparent" wood that can flex. Polycarbonate is a great example of this. So transparent we make most of our eye glasses out of it, durable and impact resistant we call water bottles made out of it "unbreakable" but we don't use it in phones.

Polycarbonate scratches easily. Making a composite means the resin can be more brittle, eg scratch resistant, while having more flex.

A house I lived in for a while had one room where all the interior panes were plexiglass. It wasn't that clear (they'd been significantly scuffed up) and there were some cracks at the edges that had been half heartedly sealed.

When asking a neighbor about it, that room was a child's room who in their younger years had tantrums and would throw things at the window. After the glass windows were replaced a couple times (once in the winter which was pricy for a "need to fix this today"), the parents replaced the windows with a rather durable plexiglass. They didn't break again, but they got scuffed up until the child outgrew the tantrums and the house was later sold.

Having something that is potentially more energy efficient (lower thermal transmission) and more durable are existing problems that this could provide a solution or a direction for future solutions.

(older articles) https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-... and https://web.archive.org/web/20201006210438/https://www.fpl.f...

Love stories like this that unintentionally show how hard parenting is. I guarantee a big share of non parents are thinking “I would simply stop the bad behavior or would have never let it start to begin with”

I’m a parent of two mostly grown boys, one of which was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, so he definitely had behaviors at a young age that were challenging.

But even I’m having a hard time rationalizing that replacing windows with plexiglass was the first solution that worked. It seems like there are a number of other things that would’ve helped without having to go to that extreme.

But I do get it — every child is different, and every parent has different methods for approaching challenges.

Just saying that this feels extreme, even from the perspective of another parent.

As a non-parent, I might replace the window with acrylic simply to deny the child the satisfaction of destroying plate glass

Most parents would tell you that having a child learn how to deny satisfaction is a huge detriment. If they learn it from a parent it’s almost impossible to constructively address.

Can you restate that for me, because the way I read it, you are saying that if you teach a child how to deny satisfaction it is a negative.

I think there is evidence to show that children who can't delay/deny satisfaction end up making significantly poorer life choices and have worse lives.

Anecdotally, every teenager I knew who couldn't accept delayed/denied satisfaction were absolute shits.

> Can you restate that for me

Definitely. I appreciate when someone asks for clarity.

The part I was talking about was “denying the child the satisfaction” as in the parent intentionally frustrating the child to teach them a lesson. I tried to take a shortcut by using the same wording as the person I replied to but I can see how that made it unclear.

The point I meant to make is that if a parent uses that technique to teach lessons in that way it’s likely that the child learns to use that technique themselves and turn it on the parent.

Further: If a child learns this type of technique from a parent it can be very hard to stop them from using it.

I didn't read the story as the plexiglass working for anything other than eliminating recurring bills of replacing windows. Clearly, the tantrums did not stop as the plexi was all scratched up. So to me, your hard time rationalizing is probably because it's not something that needs doing. Sometimes, you have to stop the bleeding before you can fix the actual issue.

It makes a lot of sense to me. If a kid keeps breaking something, stop giving it to him.

Kids (and adults) often have an impulse to make problems worse once they know they are in trouble. If they don’t have the opportunity to do that then there is a shorter path to calm down and talk.

Like if you know your kid cheated on a test, don’t ask them if they cheated and give them a chance to lie. Just start by saying you know they cheated and why.

Put me in the "ever let it start to begin with" camp, because I'm never having kids. That shit looks hard as all hell.

Having a kid that smashes windows when told to go to its room sounds like the kind of soul draining thing that causes relationships to end. Huge props to those parents for navigating through that.

On the other hand, non-parents read stories like this and assume it's common behavior, or that all children are like this.

A child who throws tantrums and breaks windows would be a parenting challenge indeed and it's not as simple as blaming the parents, but to be clear a situation like this (child breaks windows on a routine basis) would be rather rare.

Solution: don't replace the window and let the goddamn child pay for his sins during the whole winter. That'll teach him. Hint: I'm a non parent.

20% rise in dead children for parents who take this advice seriously.

Just give them another blanket or two! They’ll be fine.

I call it natural selection.

And a big share of parents are thinking “this is a really smart solution!”

“Bad behaviors” are almost always rooted in chronically unmet needs, over/under stimulation, hypersensitivity, general lack of control, sibling jealousy etc etc.

its a good idea to treat them as symptoms to investigate rather than ”behaviors” to eliminate.

Thermal conductivity isn't really relevant in window glazing materials, because nearly all of the insulation is provided by the argon in a double (or triple, or quadruple) glazing unit. Most of the recent advances in efficiency have come from improving the thermal conductivity of the frame and the use of low emissivity coatings to reduce infrared transmission.

Regarding the embodied energy, I think that the reduced durability of basically anything that isn't glass will prove fatal in most applications. We abandoned plastic smartphone screens for a reason. A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.

> A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.

Smartphone "glass" scratches pretty well too. Not that it's visible in daily use unless you look for it tho. Better have "scratched" screen than cracked screen IMO.

I've had very good luck with the tempered glass screen protectors and a cheap case thusfar. Broken a few of the protectors, mostly dropping my phone in parking lots, never had the screen actually break when I was using one.

Also, additional upside is, any scratches are on the glass protector, so, if you get a particularly bothersome one, you can just replace the glass and you're back to brand new for way cheaper than a new screen.

These protectors an already bad typing experience even worse. Never broke a glass and 10% lower resell value years later doesn't interest me.

I agree, this sounds like a dumb idea for the applications listed. For a display screen, you want something that is perfectly clear, and this doesn't sound like it will be. It'll either have visible fibers, which no one wants on their phone screen, or at best it'll have reduced transmitivity, which means you'll need to increase the OLED/backlight brightness to compensate, which means the battery life will be bad.

It sounds like a good idea for some other applications, such as lampshades, or some places where plexiglass is used; places where you don't need (or even want) perfectly-clear glass, and the strength of wood fibers can be a big asset.

YouTuber NileRed tried this a couple of times, and had pretty decent success his second time around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUU3jW7Y9Ak

Good video. It's a shame that his voice over is in that "TED talk" cadence where people pause as if everything they say is mind blowing.

Just put it at 2x speed, you don't even have to fiddle with the console anymore the controls are built into the player.

when did you have to do that?

Nit since Google picked up YouTube, at least.. really, idk for sure but I have been speeding up videos for a long, long time on YouTube and can't recall ever using the console.

Pretty sure his channel is successful due in no small part to his voice. It couldn't not be, considering the whole thing is just voiceovers. You also often see people commenting as such on his videos.

He takes great care of that; I remember him mentioning some early video, where he laboriously edited out the plosives (hissing sounds) out of his recorded voiceover

He spoke about that in a recent podcast as well. He really hates mouth noises in general so he takes the time to fix all of that in post. Quite alot of work.

I wonder how many people are doing that much extra work behind the scenes. Ross Scott was recently talking about manually editing out some very subtle sound that wasn't being filtered out from certain words.

You can remove alot of it with mic choice/technique, in the same ways that you can enhance it.

There are also plugins that take care of at least most of it now, but it's not going to get rid of every instance of it. In current year, if you want 100% of it, it makes more sense to just train a model on your speech and fake all of the audio instead of recording it, then re-record only the parts you don't find acceptable.

Do you know of any free and open source voice cloning models? I once read a suggestion to use a recording of one's own voice as an alarm clock, as we respond strongly more our own voices. Perhaps there is some nascent narcissism of mine to be developed for fun and profit!

I think I know what you mean, but the idea of "hating mouth noises" meant literally is funny to me because that's all that speech is

The sound of voice is largely a result of things happening behind the mouth, in the throat. I think most of what people refer to when they say mouth noises is lips and cheeks.

Your username is hilariously appropriate for someone commenting on what the most significant part of human speech is!

Munching sounds, those can... Be distracting. Some super sensitive microphones seem to pick up those a lot more than a human ear

I thought that only vowels were considered to be "throat" sounds, and that most consonants came from the mouth? I guess a lot of them from tongue and teeth (like "s", and "t"), but I'm not sure how I could make an "m" or a "p" sound without using my lips

When you make a noise from the voicebox, the noise is what's heard. It's modulated by the lips and tongue but the lips and tongue don't add noises, they just envelope them.

You have a point about "s" and "th" which is a whistling between tongue and palate.

This also made his voice unusually easy to clone, so there's an early AI parody of him called NileGreen.

Funny way to put it

I think the pauses are to sync up the narration with the video clips?

The man has an entertaining channel with amazing chemistry experiments, millions of subscribers, hundreds of millions of views, and a career making videos on youtube. It's a shame you're such an overly judgmental dullard.

I hesitate to wade into this but he does not do interesting chemistry. I am deep into chemistry YouTube and followed Nile red since literally his first year on the site. He has wonderful presentation, clean videography, and great presentation. But his chemistry is some of the most rudimentary in the scene.

On the opposite side "chemical force" is amazing and borderline unwatchable.

> On the opposite side "chemical force" is amazing and borderline unwatchable.

Thanks, subbed to him!

Thoisoi is also good but has a heavy Russian (Estonian?) accent, which I didn't mind but seems to have bothered him enough that he's gotten someone to dub him over now.

Also StyroPyro for an electrical mad scientist version.

…now that I go look at his channel apparently Thoisoi's lab just burned down.

Immediately noticed the same thing and makes watching the videos painful. Just speak like a human being.

I think you're reading too much into the pauses, because his style is meant to be the equivalent of a lab writeup documenting his process.

It was quite popular on YouTube at that time. With several YouTubers attempting to replicate the experiment, with various levels of success.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD4KfY4Nafgv6enUyv9Mw...

As a carpenter, the first thing I wonder about is dimensional stability. Wood expands and contracts with humidity and temperature, quite a lot more than people expect. How is that going to work on a precise object like a phone screen, or as a partially load bearing window? Not insurmountable, but very tricky stuff. In precise woodworking (fine furniture, marquetry, etc) dealing with wood movement is the main challenge and we have hundreds of years of work on the problem.

Think of it more like wood fiber reenforced epoxy. It will behave more like epoxy for most applications.

Presumably it would behave like stabilized wood where it cant absorb much moisture since the epoxy has replaced internal voids?

Yea - part of the process of epoxying the wood for translucence is fully drying it out so that those same pores and gaps can instead absorb the alternative compound.

It would be determined mostly by the dimensional stability of the polymer they're injecting.

I suspect as with wood you'd see more expansion perpendicular to the grain compared to parallel to the grain because of the effect of the cellulose fibers all running in the same direction.

Yeah, that part wouldn't change.

Those changes in wood are driven mostly by the fibers absorbing or desorbing water.

Think of it as pressure treated lumber, except with epoxy. The structure of the wood becomes encased in epoxy and can't move at all. Then your dimensional tolerance is down to that of the epoxy, which is generally pretty good.

This seems more like a gimmick than a real breakthrough. It's just resin with organic fibers in it, right? Other than it being a curiosity, it doesn't seem particularly noteworthy above the thousands of other ways we make plastic glass replacements.

Agreed, especially if the solution is just to cram a resin into the wood. That kind of defeats the purpose of competing with other plastic alternatives.

They point out in the article that they need to be better than petroleum alternatives, but they don't need to be a little better, they need to be much better.

I guess we'll see though

Sorry for being so negative, but it looks more translucent than fully transparent to me. I also would worry a little bit about all the different chemicals needed to bleach/clear the wood and then fill it with resin. Is this really better than glass, which is inert, doesn't require numerous chemical treatments, and is almost completely recyclable?

Weight. Glass is pretty heavy, which increases transport cost and fuel usage. TFA also mentions that in applications where transluency is okay, it's a better insulator.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...

> But even if the US shifted more to multistream collection, there are other economic factors standing in the way of increasing glass-recycling rates to European levels. One significant difference between the US and European nations is size. Distances in the US between a materials recovery facility and a cullet supplier, or a cullet supplier and a buyer tend to be greater. Transporting glass waste and cullet is costly because of their weight, and those costs can be a deal breaker for some glassmakers and can prevent would-be cullet suppliers from opening processing facilities. For example, in the US, some materials recovery facilities do not recover any glass from their single streams because there are no nearby buyers to make it worthwhile, according to Rue.

It’s just another kind of fiberglass, just with wood fibers instead of glass or carbon fiber.

For those interested, other papers in this theme [1][2][3][4][5]. Number [2] is interesting, as it shows electronics biodegrading in relatively short time frames with experimental comparison.

[1] "transparent paper electronics" (2014) https://www.nature.com/articles/am20149.pdf

[2] "nanocellulose nonvolatile resistive memory" (2016) https://www.nature.com/articles/am2016144.pdf

[3] "Hazy Transparent Cellulose Nanopaper" (2016) https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41590.pdf

[4] "Silver Nanowire Transparent Paper Electronics" (2018) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/epdf/10.1021/acsami.8b15230

[5] "High-Speed Fabrication of Clear Transparent Cellulose" (2020) https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/10/11/2194/pdf

You don't need the resin to make transparent cellulose-based materials, this research group did it in 2009 with just compressed celluose nanofibers, although the resin likely strengthens it. Notably, pure cellose material has a low coefficient of thermal expansion: (available on sci-hub)

Optically Transparent Nanofiber Paper (2009) By Masaya Nogi, Shinichiro Iwamoto, Antonio Norio Nakagaito, and Hiroyuki Yano

> "The thin cellulose nanofibers tend to collapse by capillary action during the evaporation of water, and the deformed condition is fixed by hydrogen bonds that form between hydroxyl groups of the cellulose, thus producing a high-strength material without the use of binders."

Here's the original source since the piece above is basically a repost: https://knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2023/why-sci...

Nile red made a great video about transparent wood a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUU3jW7Y9Ak

I wonder about its strength. Like, how thick would a piece of this transparent wood have to be, at 60' by 10', to withstand the pressure of 18,000 cubic feet of water?

That's easy. 6 inches. We have stuff that thick in stock.

A company developed "transparent aluminum" a few years ago [1]. It's actually a ceramic composite.

[1] https://hackaday.com/2018/04/03/whats-the-deal-with-transpar...

Gorilla Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_Glass :

> Gorilla Glass faces varying competition from close equivalents, including AGC Inc.'s Dragontrail and Schott AG's Xensation and synthetic sapphire.

"A New Wonder Material Is 5x Lighter—and 4x Stronger—Than Steel" (2023) https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a44725449/new-mater... :

"High-strength, lightweight nano-architected silica" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...

[Zirconium] carbide ceramics

Silicon carbide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide

2DPA-1 polyaramide: https://www.google.com/search?q=2DPA-1

https://news.mit.edu/2022/polymer-lightweight-material-2d-02... :

> However, in the new study, Strano and his colleagues came up with a new polymerization process that allows them to generate a two-dimensional sheet called a polyaramide. For the monomer building blocks, they use a compound called melamine, which contains a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Under the right conditions, these monomers can grow in two dimensions, forming disks. These disks stack on top of each other, held together by hydrogen bonds between the layers, which make the structure very stable and strong.

> “Instead of making a spaghetti-like molecule, we can make a sheet-like molecular plane, where we get molecules to hook themselves together in two dimensions,” Strano says. “This mechanism happens spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesize the material, we can easily spin-coat thin films that are extraordinarily strong.”

> Because the material self-assembles in solution, it can be made in large quantities by simply increasing the quantity of the starting materials. The researchers showed that they could coat surfaces with films of the material, which they call 2DPA-1.

FWIU, melamine is somewhat fire-supressive due to the Nitrogen.

Most other melamine products are made with formaldehyde? There is formaldehyde-free plywood for lower VOCs.

But what about fire rating and recyclability after damage due to severe weather?

Gorilla Glass is hydrophobic and oleophobic IIRC

Additional features for [transparent wood and/or the above in a supportive lattice layer] windows:

Variable opacity,

Photovoltaic output, and consummate wiring to the panel,

Thermophotoviltaic output,

Thermoelectric output from the thermal gradient,

DisplayPort, HDMI, USB-C video input,

Contactless multitouch,

Mirror mode; variable reflectivity,

WiFi: Chromecast video/audio in, Miracast or similar audio/video in, Pipewire audio in/out, Opacity/Reflectance/Volume control, Smart assistant support,

Audio out,

Sensor data; temp, humidity, light level, brokenness, contactless multitouch

Neat trick they’re using to fill it with epoxy with a specific refractive index to render it transparent. I’m familiar with that from working with glass… different glasses have varying indexes of refraction, and so do liquids. For artistic purposes, it affects how brilliant they look when cut and faceted - for instance lead glass sparkles a lot more than borosilicate, which is why one reason used for the well known traditional style of cut and polished decorative vases and cups. If you put a piece of clear glass into a beaker filled with water, you can typically see the outline of the glass underwater. However, if you tweak the refractive index of the water to match the glass, the glass is rendered invisible. This isn’t super useful but can be employed to distinguish types of glass or create niche artistic effects.

The thermal conductivity properties are perhaps what makes this material most interesting. Translucency is fine in many applications, for example as greenhouse windows.

I've been fantasizing about building a rather big greenhouse lately, and a translucent insulating material would be great! Currently, if I want decent thermal retainment in the greenhouse my options are triple pane glass(really expensive!) Or plastic. If transparent wood can be produced cheaper than glass, and with less environmental impact than plastic, it'd be a pretty good contender for this kind of construction.

I can also imagine it being great for building energy efficient houses, as any translucent material will allow the interior to absorb heat from the sun, and if it the also doesn't leak heat very much, you might be able to reduce the cost of heating somewhat by installing such a roof. And complete transparency isn't necessarily needed or even wanted in a roof, whereas for a window it's more important.

Wonderful example of going from needing something for research purposes to using in “in production” for so many other things.

Why call it transparent wood? It's filled with mostly epoxy.

Why a certain material is called "carbon fiber" even though it uses a lot of plastic to bind the fibers?

The fibers matter.

"Cellulose-doped epoxy" is not very exciting as a name.

well that sounds much more dope to my ears

They can dissolve cellulose into carbon disulphide and this process allows complete removal of lignin and it is drawn into viscose strands. (rayon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayon there are several processes. There may be even better ones to discover. If these clear fibers are embedded in a clear curing resin under vacuum it may be possible to make a very clear pane by matching the refractive index of the viscose strands and the polymer. With a very close match in indices and zero scattering voids in the strands, it should be possible to make a very clear fiber reinforced panel.

Woods seems to have a few cool properties. Other people have even tried to make it bulletproof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM

The USS Constitution, the late 18th century U.S. warship that has now been converted into a museum, was nicknamed "Old Ironsides", but her sides are not actually iron. They are made of dense hardwood in multiple layers, with the grain at a different angle each layer like in the video (but not chemically or pressure treated). This was originally intended to prevent deformation of the wood under load, but the crew found it was strong enough to deflect cannon fire.

Template:

From Nature $JOURNAL: "$NEWMATERIAL to revolutionize $INDUSTRY and create trillion-dollar business." Professor $SOMEBODY of $SOMEUNIVERSITY announced that his team has created $NEWMATERIAL which will disrupt $INDUSTRY within five years. A laboratory sample / compute model of $NEWMATERIAL indicates that it can be far more effective at $PURPOSE than any existing material. $NEWMATERIAL will be extremely cheap once a production process for $NEWMATERIAL has been created and scaled up to a world-class product.

Yes but many of those have been ground breaking e.g. WiFi, Solar Panel.

Not sure why people expect everything to be a revolution rather than a series of incremental technological advancements that mostly come from research bodies.

Because that's how the media portrays every trivial or incremental technology.

The template above is applied to preliminary research, wild hypotheses, mundane incremental technology, and true breakthroughs and is all presented the same.

Most things are not revolutionary, the problem is that everything is presented as earth shattering technological revolution even when it clearly is not.

Now do this exercise for SaaS and AI!

Might be easier to colorize and machine too. Like for stained glass type construction.

If we could show the grain of the wood a bit, that would be lovely.

Given that this is wood, I'd worry about movement, but wouldn't this be better used in windows than in screens, where it would have far better insulating properties than glass? If that's the case, the "sustainability" goal is far easier to reach. Or did I miss something?

It's addressed in the article. It could work as windows, but they'd be 'frosted'.

Is there a wood that's already almost transparent?

Can we selectively breed it to be more transparent?

They developed one, but they kept crashing into the tree since it was invisible and they they forgot where it was...

I’m still excited about pycrete!

Climate change was the nail in the coffin for that one.

There's such a goldmine of information in old forgotten research papers somewhere. I really hope somebody figures out a way to use LLMs and adjacent tech to extract these gems out of old journals.

On a related note, is it possible to get transparent silicone and won't that be better for some applications than trying to develop flexible glass-like substances using wood?

I wish science journalists would stop implying that every small technical discovery is going to lead to impactful changes in our lives.

if a transparent tree falls in the woods and lots of people are there does anyone see it?

1. What stocks should I buy to invest in this? 2. How good of an idea is this?

They'd better spend their time and effort on methods for recycling waste plastic instead of cutting down trees for products that will end up in a landfill within 5 years. What they are making this way is ultra fast tree fossilization.

OTOH this is how they seal some carbon that will end up dumped in a landfill, and not return into the atmosphere for centuries, if not millennia.

All of these uses like structural light diffusing beams and screens are all predicated on a production process and even prototypes that no one has seen.

A little cart before horse.

Wouldn't it be more strange to pour time and money into developing a material where you don't have immediate use-cases?

You realize people make this argument about every brand new technology. “You can’t even make it at scale why are you dreaming up uses for it?”

The use cases are the horse, they do the pulling. The cart is the technology.

As a daydreamer, I dream of transparent trees, but don’t really see how they wouldn’t just turn out cloudy and white instead of crystal clear.

I wish it had a less click-baity name than "transparent wood". It's wood with the lignin replaced with resin through a chemical process. Of course things can be be transparent if you replace them with something else, but then they are no longer wood if you remove the wood! It's not the the wood that is transparent, it's the resin! Dammit.

Well, the names things have should at least give you a hint about what they are. "Transparent wood" doesn't tell you everything about what the material is, but it does tell you part of where it comes from (trees) and it tells you that it's transparent. That's enough for a person to have a vague notion of what it looks like without having ever seen it, even if they still don't know what it is. Conversely, if we were to refer to it by a more precise description such as "structure of cellulose tubules held together by a polymer and disposed in an axially optically transparent manner", that would tell you more about what the material is made of, but practically nothing about what it looks like and why it's interesting.

Me too. It's even worse when they talk about how the "wood" is 10 times tougher than glass.

No, it's not the wood that's tougher -- it's the epoxy resin it's been filled with that's tougher, right?

Edit: So basically it sounds like the wood matrix is a way to add tensile strength to epoxy to make it more shatter-resistant when it's in thin sheets. I guess it's tricky semantics whether the main material should be referred to as epoxy/resin or as wood, when it's their combination.

And it seems like we have competing precedents: we refer to "carbon fiber" (the wood in this comparison) rather than the resin, but we talk about buildings made of "concrete" (the epoxy resin by analogy) rather than the rebar steel within.

Thanks to the comments below for helping to explain.

Well no, otherwise they would just use sheets of resin.

> it's the epoxy resin it's been filled with that's tougher, right?

Your comment seems to suggest that the cellulose left after removing the lignin from the wood isn't playing any role. The wood really is playing an integral role.

It's the epoxy reinforced with the cellulose remaining after lignin removal that's tougher. Just a block of cured epoxy resin isn't going to be tougher than glass.

It's a similar case with "carbon fiber" items. If you just wrapped a pressure vessel with carbon fiber, it really wouldn't help much. It's the carbon fiber reinforced resin that's strong. That tennis racket wouldn't work very well with just carbon fiber or just epoxy resin.

Yeah, same goes for reinforced concrete. Just concrete or just rebar isn't going to work nearly as well. It's the two combined that provide the powerful combination of compressive strength and tensile strength. This is the whole rationale behind composite materials: combining different materials with different properties to obtain a gestalt material.

> Just a block of cured epoxy resin isn't going to be tougher than glass.

I wouldn't be so sure -- toughness has a specific meaning (energy before fracturing), and polymers are generally going to be tougher than glass.

http://www-materials.eng.cam.ac.uk/mpsite/interactive_charts...

I haven't dug into it, but note how the article mixes up these terms to make it sound better:

> transparent wood came out around three times stronger than transparent plastics like Plexiglass and about 10 times tougher than glass.

If you plot that on those graphs it doesn't put it anywhere remarkable.

edit: This is like trying to sell an electric bike by saying that it's three times faster than walking and 1/10 the price of a car -- ok, but how does it compare to a pedal bike? It's much more obvious when you do it with words that most people understand intuitively.

Even then, the wood is still stronger. If you research densified wood, it's a similar process that uses a heated chemical bath to remove the lignin but then instead of replacing it with resin, they compress the wood at temperature. It provides strengths comparable to steel by weight without adding new material to it.

Some quick numbers from a recent study:

Transparent wood tensile strength - 171 MPa

Basswood tensile strength - 2.4 MPa

PMMA plastic - 75 MPa

*Edit - Non-transparent densified wood - 398 MPa

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13598... https://designerdata.nl/materials/plastics/thermo-plastics/p... https://www.matweb.com/search/datasheet.aspx?matguid=1775e21... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35807412/

Basswood is about the worst wood you could choose. You can damage it with your hands.

They needed something porous and compressible, so it sounds like a great choice.

I think the key word here, somewhat buried in the article, is "sustainability". If you can convince someone that what you're selling is really wood, then you get your brownie points for being green. Epoxy resin doesn't sound quite so sexy and sustainable in a planet-conscious marketplace.

IIRC it's not replacing the lignin -- the lignin are the tubes that give wood rigidity. This process removes what is inside the lignin with resin.

The tubes are called xylem and phloem. Lignin is one biopolymer that is used in their construction, but it's not the only one (cellulose is even more important) - and you shouldn't confuse the building material with the structure.

Also, the article specifically says that these processes will usually remove the lignin to make the result transparent.

The applications for transparent wood are clear.

I think we can frame the success of transparent wood as dependent on the future of transparent aluminum remaining murky.

I'm so happy it didn't take long for a "transparent aluminum" reference to be made. Now go save some whales!

Hello, computer.

I'll believe in AGI when Chat-GPT begins to make jokes like these.

I had a couple goes at it and if that's your bar for AGI, then we are a lot closer than you might think. Got a pretty decent one on the third try, but my prompt was a bit heavy handed.

Can you post the prompt? I'm curious as to how much hand holding is needed.

I got ChatGPT to make fun of you, with some prompting.

> "Antisthenes, the only person who thinks a four-day work week is 'not really a perk' because you can't stand the idea of spending an extra day away from your beloved keyboard debates. You're the kind of person who waits for AGI just so you can have a worthy opponent in a pun-off. And let's not forget your deep dive into Damascus steel - because who needs social skills when you can lecture about metallurgy? Remember, the next time your cat ignores you, it's not personal - they just can't handle your tech rants. Happy Birthday, Antisthenes! Keep being the wonderfully unique and tech-savvy person you are."

https://chat.openai.com/share/c220b6c2-6c56-44d3-bb94-8e30bc...

The true direction materials of the future will progress in remains cloudy.

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