Scientists Discover First New Polymers in 20 Years | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Discover First New Polymers in 20 Years

mashable.com

"Scientists Discover First New Polymers in 20 Years."

No, not quite. New polymers are developed by the dozen in materials science nowadays!

I think I see where the author got mixed up though: reversible thermosets would be quite novel in of themselves, and you could argue most breakthrough developments in thermosets/thermoplastics are from decades ago. But this is far from the only polymer family there is.

It's a shame. Clearly the author is way out of his depth here (e.g. 'Polymers are essentially macromolecules made up of 10000 or more atoms'; 'the researchers (...) are now submitting their findings to Science'), but that's what science editors are there for.

On the other hand, The New York Times has a much better article [1] and reveals another twist: apparently the PI found the reaction by accident. Check it out, and shame on Mashable for spreading bad science.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/science/error-leads-ibm-re...

They are developed by the dozen, per day.

-former material scientist-

Link to the paper (paywalled): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6185/732

It be interesting to see how biocompatible and what the durability of these material is. One of the problems with current generation of joint implants is that nearly all of the materials we use (for biocompatibility, corrosion resistance, and durability reasons) are all way stiffer than the material (bone or cartilage) that they replace, resulting in stress shielding in bone, and increased wear at contact surfaces in joints (especially when you only have a one sided replacement).

If Titan (god, I hope they give it a better name) turns out to play nice in the body and is sufficiently durable, it could be pretty interesting to see what happens to implant design in the future.

Right, so if i've got this right, 4,4'-oxydianiline is this (pairs of parens are supposed to be circles denoting benzene rings; apologies for writing out the carbons, i can't do plain hexagons):

        C - C       C - C
       /     \     /     \
  H2N-C  ( )  C-O-C  ( )  C-NH2
       \     /     \     /
        C - C       C - C

The paraformaldehyde does its job as monomeric formaldehyde (the double quote is a double bond running vertically, horrific i know):

     O
     "
  HO-C-OH

And the polymerisation is a straightforward condensation of the formaldehyde with one of the amines, so the monomer is:

           C - C       C - C      O
          /     \     /     \     "
  ...-NH-C  ( )  C-O-C  ( )  C-NH-C-...
          \     /     \     /
           C - C       C - C

And here's a monomer with a bit of its neighbourhood:

  - C      O      C - C       C - C      O      C -
     \     "     /     \     /     \     "     /
   )  C-NH-C-NH-C  ( )  C-O-C  ( )  C-NH-C-NH-C  (
     /           \     /     \     /           \
  - C             C - C       C - C             C -

There's nothing really radical in terms of the building blocks, but it's a novel combination. Cool.

I had never come across oxydiamine before, but i get the impression it's a common component in polymers, and it looks fairly boring and inert. I guess it's not a single big aromatic system, right? Wrong number of electrons.

The reason this is described as a "hemiaminal" is because the formaldehyde carbon can do keto-enol tautomerism and turn into this:

  - C      OH     C -
     \     |     /
   )  C-NH-C-NH-C  (
     /     |     \
  - C      OH     C -

Which has hydroxyl groups and nitrogens on the same carbon, and so is a hemiaminal.

I couldn't figure out the "further cyclize at high temperatures, producing poly(hexahydrotriazine)s", though. Does that mean cyclising using linkages like this? Or is there some way the chains can crosslink?

those drawings are beautiful. how you did it? babel?

I just typed a lot of letters, punctuation marks, and spaces into the text area. Mostly spaces.

This link makes much more sense now that I see that the article is already published rather than being submitted to Science. Journals like Science and Nature have strict policies of not publishing papers if the results have already been publicized by the authors.

The scanning electron micrograph conveys little information while the chemical structures would have been interesting even to amateur chemists. When new science is inaccessible to citizens that don't want to pay for it twice it should be the minimum responsibility of the scientific press to report the key findings.In chemistry, that means structures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com