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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea behind it is really clever. You don't know how to manufacture the material. Create a test that separates the good particles. Sieve through mountain of crushed material, out comes small amount of good stuff. Genius.

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I would call it the "Cinderella Method" after the German version of it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Aschenputtel,_by_th... ("Die Guten ins Töpfchen, die Schlechten ins Kröpfchen"_)

Why do the good ones go in the potty and the bad ones in the crib? (Google Translate.)

Potty would be a small pot, for keeping the lentils. Crib is a mistranslation, I don't know German well enough to know if it's even a possible translation but the word means small crop. The ashes go into the crop because they are fertilizer. Both words, pot and crop, are in diminutive form which makes the sentence have a sing-song feel and memorable.

Crop as in "bird's throat", I think. Good goes in the kitchen, bad goes in the pigeon.

Good goes in the pot, bad goes in the crop. (i.e. keep the good, toss the bad)

Agreed very cool. I had seen a previous process where sorting out conductive nanotubes from non-conductive ones by inducing a current in them and pull them into a different sluice with a magnetic field. Interesting stuff.

Yeah this is almost common at this point, specifically with carbon nano structures. The reason why is it is very expensive to manufacture specific structures but cheap and easy to make a ton of random structures. So yeah you "just" sort through the random ones, of course sorting through to find the desired structure can be fantastically difficult, but hey it works!

Half of chemistry/chemical engineering seems to be just various techniques of separation of the things you want from the thing you don’t want. Strong magnets might be unusual, but chemistry is full of doing strange things to get results.

I just watched the explosions and fire guy set fire to a mixture of things to synthesize something. If i remember correctly it was a glowing nanoparticle.

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