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Comment by Chilinot | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be the research behind it: https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00...

And there are only smaller comparisons towards steel. They are more focused on how it compares to regular wood.

In summary, what they are doing: 1. Boil the wood. 2. Press the wood. 3. Done.

This seems to be the original research paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 [edit: whoops, it's the same paper]

"First, natural wood blocks were immersed in a boiling aqueous solution of mixed 2.5 M NaOH and 0.4 M Na2SO3 for 7 h, followed by immersion in boiling deionized water several times to remove the chemicals. Next, the wood blocks were pressed at 100 °C under a pressure of about 5 MPa for about 1 day to obtain the densified wood"

Pretty simple and straightforward.

The real question for practical purposes is how much of these fine chemicals are actually consumed during the process and how much can be reused. The foul-smelling Kraft process has held on to its title in paper production because the chemicals it uses can be recycled within the plant itself. There are many better, less polluting ways to make paper, but they consume an impractical amount of chemicals which drives the price way out of economic usability.

This process will need to regenerate almost all of that sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, or it's just peracetic paper again.

I'd rather live next to a leaky paper plant than a teflon plant any day.

I wouldn't. The numerous miscarriages that my grandmother had while living in a mill town, and the cancer diagnoses that followed family who worked at the mill taught me to stay upstream of mill towns.

I think it's clear that you're not familiar with how often paper mills have poisoned the nearby populations.

Visit Int'l Falls, MN. They have a paper mill and then there's another one on the other side of the river in Canada. It's foul

I'd rather live next to neither. Paper plants stink.

Absolutely not. Paper mills are fucking nightmares.

I wonder if this can help offset the weakness of new growth wood - trees and wood specifically designed for fast growth and quick turn around.

https://brenthull.com/article/old-growth-wood

My thoughts as well. I was holding a board the other day and it just seemed, forgive me, aerosol-ized. Like those Aero chocolates that are essentially full of bubbles. "This new wood doesn't feel like wood used to" and shook my fist at the passing cloud.

I have high hopes for this product as a leg of sustainability.

I wonder if it would work for bamboo.

My first thought as well. Considering they are the fastest growing plants. We cant stop the world from using steel or be carbon sensitive on things. But as soon as economics incentives kicks in we could decarbonise faster than most could imagine. I really hope timber technology improves to the point like solar where we would plant forest the size of a state.

The problem that I see is that, if the thickness is so drastically reduced as in the video posted somewhere above, you will need (much, much) thicker wood to start with.

New growth wood is sustainable and is perfectly fine in construction, if you need strength, you can buy LSL/LVLs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM

Here's a NileRed video replicating the process.

Ok that was super cool to see. I can see how clearly the process described in the paper has plenty of room for improvement

There is a great deal of prior art in aviation and automotive engineering for densified wood, which have all proven to be non competitive with metal. Lighter, stronger, but not quickly adaptable to new designs or refinements.....the molds are large, complex, heavy, and expensive. And a simple no go for beams is that they(wood) burns and steel does not, will instantly remove them(wood) from bieng used in most building codes past a certain hight, where minimum times for evacuation durring a fire can not be met.

One of the reasons why Ipe (pronounced “e-pay”) wood is so fire resistant, is because of its density. You can get Class-A fire resistant Ipe that can be used to build in the Wildland/Urban Interface environment. Other woods like Teak and Rock Maple are also super dense, but I don’t know if you can get them in Class A ratings.

Now, Ipe is very expensive. I would hope this is less expensive than Ipe, and then the trick is to make your starting materials much larger, and being able to account for the shrinkage once the densification process has been completed.

You could also do laminates of this densified wood, in order to be able to use it for beams, plywood type functions, etc…. Or even fire resistant 2x4 boards.

I was under the impression that mass timber buildings were actually safer for fires because it takes a very long time to burn through, and unlike steel they won't lose their strength in an intense fire.

what maters is time to escape befor "total involvement", or confaguration, steel contributes nothing to a fire, fire cant climb or follow it, and it acts as a heat sink, vs wood, which is fuel. All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that. Add in modern fire suppresion and fighting equipment and the current situation is quite secure vs/vs fire. edit, another factor is comunication and road infrastructure, where the recent fire storm in California, destroyed many many wooden structures, but the loss of life was exceptionaly low compared to other firestorms in less developed countrys. woods great, love the stuff, have a lot of wood, live in a wooden house and heat with wood, but there is essentialy no way that can be done with a thousand people in a huge building, so steel, which I also love and work with. Everything in it's place.

"total involvement", or confaguration, is what matters true. However fires are more complex than that. Generally the wood frame isn't a source of fuel for the fire until later. The carpet and other furniture that is the same in all builds is likely to burn first. Not long after the wood frame is burning the steel frame absorbs enough heat to fail - but either way you really want to be out long before it gets that bad (and probably are dead if you are not)

> All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that.

You're right insofar as lots of improvements have been made to steel-and-concrete building fire safety since the 1970s. Plastics are sometimes still a problem.

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

https://nfsa.org/2023/08/22/understanding-combustible-materi...

So what size will a 2x4 be after that? 0.75x1.25 just doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it?

In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?

It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days. The mills control for it now, but meanwhile everyone got used to the weird sizes and we're stuck with them because everyone centered on the shrunk sizes for tooling and standards. Pros know but it's a pain for DIYers.

https://www.inchcalculator.com/actual-size-of-dimensional-lu...

> It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days.

That's just an old wives tale.

Lumber shrinks for money reasons, older lumber is bigger [1] with sequential revisions to the standard decreasing it's real size [2] [3] (the difference between 2in and 15/8in in strength is minimal however you can keep doing that math, and they did, to go down from 2in to 1.5in over a century).

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/vv9atu/t...

[2]: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDeta...

[3]: https://www.synthmind.com/miscpub_6409.pdf

Lumber shrinks, but not that much. There was NO standard and so mills just did what felt they could get away with calling a 2x4. Some mills did 2x4 was 2"x4", some did other sizes, it depending on how much they felt they could cheat vs how much they felt advertising the larger size would help. I have seen houses built in 1880 that used modern dimensions for 2x4s.

This person claims otherwise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaJFudED5FQ

They claim that the change was driven by railroad shipping charges, and wasn't based on drying, but on pre-planing the rough lumber to reduce shipping cost. They further claim that in 1919 the US Dept. of Agriculture studied the issue and ended up defining a national standard for what the post-planed dimensions of a 2x4 should be. And they further claim that it took until the early 1960s to settle on a new standard that matches what we use today.

I've seen houses built in the late 1960s that used non-standard 2x4s, so I will dispute those facts. I don't remember details (and can't be bothered to look them up), but IIRC several different standards were tried before the current one finally took.

The pre-planing is a common claim, but I don't believe it. They can make lumber whatever size they want - of course they need to plane it, but they just make it larger to account for that. Still the planing excuse it one they like to use because it doesn't show "them" as trying to cheat us.

> In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?

I understand the origins of this. But I've never understood why we haven't moved on to actual sizing given the scale at which standardized lumber dimensions are produced

I'm just glad there is a standard. It doesn't matter much what size it is. What matters is that I can go to any lumber yard/mill when I need more and get it. What matters is that I and my inspector can look at (or more likely memorize!) some charts and be sure that everything is strong enough. Is actually 2"x4" lumber stronger than the standard sizes - yes, but most of the time it doesn't matter, and if it does I really want to step up to 2x6 (or something) because margin of safety is important when you get that close)

Definitely done in Ireland and the UK anyway.

So I guess boiling and pressing will get rid of the trapped air inside wood and it won't work very well as an insulator?

Wood is already a poor insulator, so if it takes up less space and you can fit more insulation, that is better.

My uncle built his home from hardwood. No insulation. In sub freezing temps, you can put your hand in the wood and it isn't cold. Compared to my (poorly) insulated home, it b is significantly better.

That isn't a good way to measure because the inside of the house is warming up the walls. Hardwood is a poor insulator, but it is an insulator. If you touch wood it will feel warm, but it still loses a lot of heat compared to a properly insulated wall.

Hearing this reminds me of the Dara O' Briain line that American houses seem to have been built by the first two little pigs.

Are the walls solid hardwood? Is it a cabin? How thick are the walls?

Yes, but if it's a much worse insulator, the extra heat transfer through studs might be more significant?

I'm not sure if it's been measured, but I imagine this densified wood would probably have at least twice the thermal conductivity of typical construction lumber, since naturally dense hardwoods already approach that.

So it seems like we'd basically need to replace 2x studs with 1x studs, assuming the same stud spacing, in order to match the thermal performance of a traditional wall.

I don't think this would be a dealbreaker at all though, one could always use continuous insulation instead of cavity insulation, which has a lot of benefits anyway. Maybe it can end up being a competitor to metal studs for commercial builds, at least.

If this just replaces steel beams or allows more post frame construction, the walls wouldn't change. Actually, if used in post frame style construction, it would allow for more space for insulation with less thermal bridging.

In modern construction we already put continuous insulation outside the 2x4 so that we don't have to deal with the studs and how much worse insulation they are.

I think that's the best practice, also for avoiding condensation, but isn't it pretty uncommon at least for residential builds in the US? Here in Washington, codes were recently changed to require continuous insulation, but I believe that's only with the prescriptive method. From what I've seen most builders seem to continue working around it and doing cavity insulation only.

Depends on where you live, but that seems to be fairly common anyway in new builds.

Not a materials guy but would densified wood lead to such a drastic increase in thermal conductivity?

Air has very low thermal conductivity, so for a lot of materials, thermal conductivity is primarily a function of how much air they contain and how it's structured (ideally in tiny pockets to minimize heat transfer through convection). Like spray foams, fiberglass insulation, etc are basically designed to hold air while minimizing convection.

I believe that's somewhat true of woods as well - different woods seem to range from 0.12-0.25 W/(mK) or so, which is somewhat less conductive than the underlying compounds like cellulose (0.4), thanks to the trapped air in wood.

It seems like densifying wood would mitigate the insulation contribution of trapped air, causing thermal conductivity to approache that of the underlying compounds like cellulose, though I'm not sure exactly what those compounds are with their process and how close they get to that air-free extreme.

if you dont make any other changes, it will have some detectable impact, but conductivity is linear with all of conductivity, depth, and area; and the other dimensions can also be changed like the screw diameter/pitch or the dimensions of the stud.

its very unlikely that this change will be an important consideration for house building or shopping though. theres simpler spots to reduce heat loss, like double paning your windows

"poor insulator", seems like an odd statement, but it's all relative I suppose. It's certainly better than the masonry or steel that this will replace. But if you take the air pockets out of it, then it's not going to be as good, but likely better than steel.

You probably only use this wood for the frame, or spread through the rest of the wooden structures like rebar?

Wood used in framing has a small r value because of the air. The timber on the exterior prevents all the energy transfer.

The loss of r value can be off set with two 2x4 frames. As strong as a 2x6 wall and about the same price. Added benefit is air gaps.

Probably not. But it eliminates a lot of what makes wood flammable.

I wonder how it impacts the effects of humidity and time to make wood warp.

Sounds like a great candidate for decking.

Steel, itself, is a material with a wide range of properties. In terms of tensile strength, which is the simplest kind of strength to measure, steel ranges from mild steel at 400 N/mm^2 to piano wire alloys at about 2500 N/mm^2. "Stronger than steel" is a flashy appellation that usually means you have just reached the bottom end.

A similar phenomenon occurs sometimes in papers about ceramics research. A very tough ceramic will often see a comparison of its fracture toughness to that of aluminium; as you've guessed, this usually refers to the toughness of pure unalloyed aluminium.

If that is the case, then I don't see any novelty here. This has been done for a long time. In Germany, this is called "Panzerholz" (something like "bulletproof wood")

Modern Panzerholz (Kunstharzpressholz, 'synthetic resin densified wood') is manufactured with resin - this new material doesn't seem to rely on resin, but only on the cellulose contained in the wood.

Yes, but Panzerholz is plywood. They seem to be doing the same, but with bulk timber.

Why isn’t panzerholz wood used everywhere? What is the article missing?

Same reason we don't build bridges out of titanium: panzerholz is more expensive than normal wood, and normal wood is good enough for most applications where it's used.

Titanium's strength is in its weight: steel's Young modulus is almost twice as high, so you'd have to build rather large bridges to compensate. Titanium is useful where weight is a concern, like things you launch into space. Steel is perfect whenever weight isn't a concern and sometimes still works really well because you get so much strength out of so little which is why there are so many fans of the thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames.

Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.

> Titanium is mostly better where corrosion

Until we mix metals and have galvanic corrosion, where an Al + Ti system corrodes exactly where the metals touch.

It's not titanium that will corrode when you have an aluminium frame bike with a Ti bolt at the bottom bracket.

> Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.

Scale of the artifact is also a variable if size is a constraint.

Those steel bike frames don't have much in common with the steel used for structural steel. They both are iron alloys with added carbon content, the similarity stops there.

Similarly trying to compare "titanium" to "steel" is dumb. No one uses pure titanium for structural purposes & there are hundreds of common steel alloys.

> thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames

Please stop repeating this FUD. The notion that a rigid steel frame provides measurable shock absorbtion over the supple, air-filled, rubber tires is mind numbingly stupid.

Steel bikes feel “better” and “springier” than aluminum bikes. Objectively, they last longer than aluminum bikes.

What exact differences in physical properties or construction leads to this, I couldn’t tell you, but you can pick up an old steel bike frame for cheap and experience it yourself. Well-made steel frames are much lighter than poorly-made ones, so I would recommend finding one of the good ones.

So long as that "feel" is just that, there's nothing to talk about.

Unless of course you tried two of the exact same bike with the only difference being the frame material, in a blind test. Then we could talk.

But most likely, you tried two completely different bikes, felt some difference and arbitrarily decided it must be the frame material.

No, I tried probably ten or fifteen of each type over a 35 year period.

There are a bunch of factors, including tube thickness, alloy (I’m sure that when it comes to steel this matters, I think it doesn’t matter with aluminum), and frame geometry.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, if you are using rim brakes, aluminum wheels are so much better than steel wheels it’s not even a conversation worth having. This is because aluminum wheels, unless they are painted, will have a nice aluminum oxide coating. This is effectively a ceramic and the coefficient of friction with rubber brake pads doesn’t change when the rims are wet, say on a rainy day. Steel rims lose all friction when wet.

Because I have been around for a while and made a lot of “experiments” (mistakes), I know some things. I’m happy to share what I know with you.

The limiting factor in most structural uses of wood is stiffness not strength.

You could build your floor joists out of scaffolding boards, but they'd bend unacceptably.

Stiffness is basically a product of geometry rather than strength. Making your wood stronger doesn't help you if you need it to be stiffer.

As you can see from Figure 3a at the top of the third page of the paper, this densified wood is about ten times the stiffness of natural wood, in the sense of Young's modulus. Stiffness is basically the product of Young's modulus and geometry, not geometry alone.

Does it remain so stiff for decades, as would be needed in construction? Many wood treatments' effectiveness fades after time.

My assumption is that it would. Steam-bent wood stays bent once it cools and the lignin sets. It's a lot like thermoforming plastic.

There's another advantage of putting wood through a heating-and-cooling cycle: you remove internal stresses that cause it to twist.

I'm curious about that too. See my comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44027557 for more.

Thanks, I actually just read that and replied there as well. I didn't even notice it was from the same person.

You've been extremely informative and helpful, thank you.

Thank you! I am not a specialist in the area so I may be overlooking something important.

Oh man if that's true I hope it replaces dimensional lumber for floor joists. I'm not sure which psychopath invented span charts for home building, but it's extremely rare I'm in a non-slab house where the cabinets and such don't rattle from just a normal person walking across the floor!

I ended up putting beams in to half the span across my own house because it got so annoying(I want to say they are high grade SYP 2x10s @ 13 or 14')

I-joists + glue and screws are just fine if you want to avoid deflection.

"armor wood"

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?

  > 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.

“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...

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

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

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

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 ...

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".

I never claimed it is a wide-spread practice.

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?

> 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!

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/

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Aw, thanks!

blushes

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

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

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

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

Probably adoption of the "long now" foundation style ?

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?

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.

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

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

I was born in the 20th century. I was filling out a medical form and put my birth year in with 2 digits. The web app took that to mean just the 2 digits. No, I wasn't born in AD 70.

That's the kind of programming that makes you reluctant to put anything into it.

Not using leading zeros seems fine if you're using AD near it to indicate that it's not 1942.

this is just bad programming, it has nothing to do with leading zeroes

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.

> 01890 .. 01929

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

> 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/

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.

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.

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.

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 ..

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why do we demand that the price of progress be paid by those people least able to pay? Why is it that the people who work, who produce everything that we rely on to survive, are also the ones who suffer, whose life-plans are upended, whose homes are taken away, whose bodies are mangled -- while the rich, who contribute little other than "management of capital", are fine and dandy?

If someone were to say to you, today, that your career was over, and that the only choice was to go work in a mine -- and moreover, that thanks to the great pressure of unemployed laborers in the same boat as you, safety standards had fallen by the wayside? Would you consider that a "necessary cost" for progress? If not, then what's the bar? When do you consider it acceptable to tell someone, who trained for years and years to do something useful for the community, that due to technological developments on the other side of the continent they need to find a new job, slash their budget, abandon their home, give up plans of having a family?

It's easy to say "they should learn to code" -- wait, but now coding's not the place to be, is it? The rate at which these shifts happen has accelerated, continues to accelerate, and is already well past the ability of people to re-skill mid-career.

We already have enough resources to feed and house every person in the US (and the world, though I admit the logistics there are a bit tougher). If automation actually meant that the broader population -- no, not their hypothetical grandchildren -- would become more prosperous, perhaps it would be something worth celebrating. But as is, growth for the sake of growth, at the cost of suffering that could easily be avoided had we a different economic system, seems hard to justify in my eyes.

There was a inventor in Germany which got featured in a science show on television, which did something similar. He build a big pressure cooker where he placed the wood and a liquid mixture inside and let it cook for many hours. The wood got soak through completely, which gave it, as he claimed, resistance against rotting at every layer. For outdoor appliances the wood would not need any coating and not deteriorate. There was no mention about the hardness, but he also didn’t press it.

Pressure treated wood is a very common outdoor building material.

InventWood's research paper mentions not just boiling, but boiling it with an "aqueous mixture of NaOH and Na2SO3", which also helps with "partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose".

That seems to really only provide benefits in use cases where weight isn't an issue, since this is conceptually just taking out air and adding more wood into the same amount of space to increase strength.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but almost all use cases for wood rely on it to be somewhat light, for which the lattice structure is already fairly ideal.

No, density is doubled, but strength is increased 11×, according to the paper. Sandwich panels with strong, stiff face sheets will always beat relatively homogeneous material like natural wood for the kinds of applications you are talking about.

Oh interesting, then it laminating thin sheets of this should be far lighter for the same strength, I didn't expect the strength increase to be anywhere near 2x much less 11x.

in Finland they seem to have a similar method, where they bake the wood (they don't press it), the wood is then stable against rot and pests. please note: don't experiment with your oven at home, it will be unusable afterwards (because of the evaporating resins)

Heat treated wood is used in the US as well. I’ve seen heat treated ash used for exterior purposes.

I would have thought that they remove the Lignin and replaced it with a (structurally better) resin.

Can this make, say, planks out of sawdust?

MDF includes some binders, but is essentially this. Doubt the glue-free version would stick together well, but maybe.

The sawdust planks wouldn't have the properties of the long-grain wood fiber planks though. The fibers that make up natural wood are what makes the wood tough.

This is kind of how plywood is made - take wood chips and glue and press them together. I feel it wouldn't work well with sawdust, even with the chemical and heat+pressure process, since there would be little natural cohesion between the particles (larger pieces = more strength, up until you have entire logs/boards).

Large chips glued together is Oriented Strand Board (OSB). Small chips glued together is Particle Board. Sawdust glued together is Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF). Plywood is layers of veneer--thin sheets of wood--glued together in alternating orientations.

Plywood can be nice. It doesn't expand with temperature changes like planks and doesn't have a grain direction that it can split along.

The others, I hate. Any small amount of moisture and they delaminate. OSB is so ugly and rough that you need to hide it because you'll never be able to apply enough primer to cover the chip pattern. I'd rather just use regular plywood at that point. Particle board is the same, but I'm okay with the kind coated on both sides with melamine. It's pretty hard to get a much flatter surface than melamine particle board without spending ridiculously more on granite.

But MDF is the worst. A lot of people like MDF because it's easy to work and can be fairly structural, if you use it right. But it's very, very easy to damage, has absolutely zero edge strength, and it makes a super-fine, extremely carcinogenic sawdust that is extremely difficult to clean up completely. Yes, all sawdust is carcinogenic, always wear a mask in the wood shop, but MDF sawdust never goes away.

Frankly, it's just easier to get a bunch of sheets of birch plywood and southern pine dimensional lumber shipped direct to my house and not worry about it.

>>This is kind of how plywood is made - take wood chips and glue and press them together.

You are evidently thinking of chipboard, not plywood.

Chipboard (also known as Particle Board), is a wood composite material of wood chips and sawdust, compacted and bound together with adhesives.

Plywood is made of multiple cross-layered wood veneers, pressed with adhesives.

A bit more detail at [0].

[0] https://www.thewoodworkplace.com/plywood-vs-chipboard/

> You are evidently thinking of chipboard, not plywood.

Thank you - yes, I mixed them up in my head!

That would be fiberboard, not plywood. Plywood is "plies" of wood veneer layered perpendicularly (cross-grained) to improve dimensional stability.

probably not. This does not work by adding a binder, like a plastic. This process softens the wood and then compresses it. I'm not sure that doing that with sawdust would give you enough tensile strength.

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