https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibranium !

Porous Aluminum eh? Wonder how well it stands up to gallium, or acetylene, or MAP gas, or a grind wheel instead of a cutoff wheel.

Waiting for this to exist in an Abus lock so my storage unit can stop being broken into my tweakers.

Nothing in there on its electrical properties. Can it be cut using a plasma cutter?

This resists mechanical forces, but what about EDM milling or plasma ?

That’s pretty cool. can it be cut with bolt cutters or such?

So how do you shape/use it during manufacturing?

Aluminum. A highly reactive metal prone to rapid decomposition in household drain cleaner. Yeah, this isn't going to revolutionize bike locks.

This would be great for bike locks!

Can Proteus be cut by Proteus?

Space elevator?

Physical shields for spacecraft?

Bullet proof vests?

Ammunition?

Will this work as armor?

In Star Trek, they called it transparent aluminium!

Sounds amazing, but how will we dispose of this? Looks like 760 C is required to form this. I imagine it will need to be heated above this to dispose of.

Bosnianbill's YouTube channel has featured some nifty "unpickable" designs:

* Inaccessible keyhole: https://invidio.us/watch?v=OLsJDELd4lo

Sounds related to the lock you describe, except this one is purely mechanical.

* Serpentine keyhole: https://invidio.us/watch?v=1ey2SFHbZV8

This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4f1H6mYHOI

Like all metal items, this is trivial to recycle by melting it.

Not really. Armor made of this material has to be much thicker than ordinary steel plate. Furthermore, ordinary steel plate is entirely effective against swords, except at the joints and articulations.

I use diamond metal blades because I don’t want my blade turning into shrapnel.

You'd need direct heating, a conventional blade still would not work. The alumina spheres hold off the cutting edges and block heat flow from hotspots. A small amount of aluminum foam will melt, but once it's far enough away from the hot zone it'll just serve to conduct heat away from the ceramic much more rapidly than it otherwise would.

Yes I did watch the video, and yes I agree it would be fairly useless for bike locks. Though there is a very expensive bike lock that has an aluminium surround the try to foil small angle grinders (the idea is that it is too thick for the discs to get through). Would be useful for that.

Very good point. It's not an entirely serious suggestion. I just want tires made out of something indestructible.

Are you going to make that explosive sensitive to shocks? Otherwise, how is it going to ignite? And if you would do so, you realize how dangerous that is, right?

Booby traps are illegal.

You can do whatever you want with your bike but I sure am not carrying something designed to be activated by a strong jolt on my bike when I bike through decaying city streets full of potholes and bumps and other fun stuff like that.

I’m sure the legal department of the lock manufacturer would recommend against that..

Amazing alliterations always achieve admiration.

Interesting. There are other fruit & seeds out there that develop strong exocarp or mesocarp (think coconut) and I believe it has to do with wanting the fruit to travel longer distances to encourage geographic spread. The plant probably "prefers" that the seedlings take hold some distance from the parent, so wants the seed preserved longer and taken away by certain kinds of animals (hairless apes!)

What kind of animals live, or lived, in wild citrus' native range? Now I'm curious. [EDIT: Himalayan foothills... Macaques? Elephants?]

Or it's selected for particular animals as spreaders? In wild grapes, for example, most are adapted for bird spread (small dark acidic berry, high up in a tree on dangling shoots) but there are a handful of species (vitis labrusca "fox grape" for example, and vitis rotundifolia aka muscadines) that have adapted for mammals and they are quite different: larger berry, lighter colours, strong smell (think Concord), lower acids, slip skin, and a tendency to "shell" (fall off the vine when ripe). They also tend to grow wild in shadier moister areas, e.g. the underbrush where foxes and skunks and racoons etc. will grab them, not birds.

(absorbed by osmosis during my time at Zest, a JIT produce handling company)

Harvest time is extremely hectic. There's a very small window to get months worth of produce picked, sorted, cooled, packed and shipped. Cooling is a major bottleneck, because capital for refrigeration is not unlimited. Likewise any delay can be a major issue- if a truck is slow to load, how do you know whether or not you need to re-cool your produce first?

It's well known what temperatures produce does well at (can't be too hot or too cold without MAJORLY affecting end margins) because it's easy to test by setting a fridge to a given temperature. It's much harder to know, for a given type of produce, how fast it will cool or heat, and how long you need to spend doing that. It's not as simple as sticking a thermometer in it, which will create paths for heat to move into and out of the produce. Even then you still don't know what the heat distribution inside the produce is so you can optimize the temperature over as much of the plant as possible.

It's really quite tricky and stuff like this helps farmers a lot. IMO farmers do more actual number math more than almost any other occupation (ex: [1]). Much of it is rules of thumb and guesstimation, but they still are constantly balancing dozens of figures to make choices every day. They're always doing mental calculations in economics, biology and physics. Even if the job wasn't so physically and technically taxing, I would respect the hell out of them just because of the mental workload.

[1] https://youtu.be/ywBV6M7VOFU?t=630

I heard (no refernece, sorry) that oranges do from green to orange when the temperature drops. Apparently colour change does not affect taste, nor necessarily indicate ripeness. Would anyone knowledgeable please chip in and correct or elaborate on this please.

Actual Churchill quote would be "My dear you are inedibly bitter, but tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be inedibly bitter."

Yes, there is. They hypothesize that this material works because the ceramic spheres vibrate inside the flexible matrix of the aluminum foam, damaging the grinding wheel. A thinner foam will have less ability to flex, and smaller spheres will be have less momentum to use against the wheel.

Plus, if you watch the video of them grinding the material (https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...), you can see that the grinding wheel penetrates over half an inch before it begins to be destroyed.

For comparison I was learning about medieval armor recently. Steel breastplates are about 2mm at their thickest, typically. So that's a rather heavy duty armor idea you have.

Real question then is how it would fare against bullets and piercing attacks. Cutting is only one possible threat, and usually not the biggest threat. Knife resistant bullet proof vest are already a thing, so how would this be better?

You do not (cannot) weld steel to aluminum.

This looks like aluminum billet to me. And other than the grinder stopping, it looks like it’s cutting exactly like aluminum.

The fence is to keep 5 year olds out. As the parent of a 5 year old I'm not sure this is strong enough to do the job.

Yeah but 99% of thieves can't do that. If they could then they'd likely have a real job. Lots of locks are invulnerable to the picking, especially serious digital ones.

I am highly entertained by this, because I just happened to find his videos a few weeks ago and have been watching a ton of them.

My point is that if you look at that definition of "cut", it's not just rendering one item into two pieces, other wise tearing or cracking something would be cutting it, and those aren't cutting either.

I doubt this material is impervious to shear force, or being lowered in temperature until it's brittle and cracked. But those aren't methods of cutting.

The new Ramset guns are surprisingly quiet. Certainly, the police won't be called, and there's not much of a risk to the thief.

This is because unlike a gun, there is no need for the gases to release to the outside openly. Therefore, there is much, much less noise, and it doesn't sound like a gun at all.

Do you have lots of experience looking at reports of stolen bikes? I have heard exactly the opposite in my major metro area. My sources are law enforcement and bike clubs.

Nobody will stop you in San Francisco.

Even without a pre-cut rack, its pretty common that whatever you've locked up to (sign post, bike rack, parking meter, handrail, etc) is a lower grade of steel than the ultra-hard stuff on the shackle of a good bike lock or chain anyways. No need to pre-cut that cheap galvanized steel sign post if you don't want to, a thief would have no problem getting through it quickly if something attractive was locked up.

I'll use about $100 worth of u-locks to lock up my not-super-visually-impressive $250 spare parts city errand bike as long as overnight (and this is in NYC).

But I think the strike point where spending more on heavier/fancier locks to secure a more valuable bike just stops making sense is right about at the price point I'm already at, most nicer bikes are simply too nice to leave unattended on city streets in the US or anywhere else where bike theft is a concern. Someone with a good set of pocket tools could rip $500 worth of parts off a well-locked frameset and wheels in 20 mins without making any noise... and I don't think a non-cuttable material helps that scenario, even if it does make very secure locks attainability light.

(Could be a really big deal for bike touring folks though, who often ride out with a cheap cable lock at best because anything better is too heavy to carry for days/weeks)

That's brilliant. It reminds me of people who have written about how disappointing magic tricks generally are when they're revealed, because you think "I could have thought of that" but you probably couldn't.

They are very much a problem still, I've punctured a tire recently (the expansive puncture-resistant one). That's after several punctures last year (but that was on a regular old tires, that's why I switched). Before you ask - it's not a problem with the wheel or anything, I've had it checked.

I've never had a flat tire in the countryside trips, though. It's always on broken glass some jerks throw at bike lanes in bigger cities.

Also probably the fact I'm overweight is a factor.

BTW when I was about 7 I had a small bike with full-rubber tires. It was great, I wonder why it's not done for full-size bikes. It wasn't THAT much heavier.

On cars they absolutely are still a problem in practice.

> Not enough people are tunnelling their way out of prison

If i am ever in jail i am going to correct this issue

Just compare it to car tires and it doesn't sound so expensive anymore :)

Essentially, the powder actuated piston fires a blank round and uses the pressure in order to propel a mass, that hits the lock and, assuming that the lock is restrained in the opposite direction, creates an immense force that destroys the internals of the lock and forces it open, all in less than a second.

The one shown in that movie uses compressed air. Some other sorts use powder charges, just like a powder actuated nailgun.

Pneumatic

One painful lesson I learned after having an expensive bike with an expensive lock stolen is that as you harden the lock at some point the weakest link shifts from being the lock to the thing the lock is attached to.

This is a little disingenuous. There exist locks that he cannot pick, but the vast majority of his uploads are three minutes or fewer and include a successful picking attempt. More on-topic for this thread, a common LPL theme is that bike lock chains are made of high-quality hard-to-cut material, but the lock cores are still often commodity parts which are picked open by standard techniques and tools.

I would say that much more important for discussing LPL is that he has immense real-world experience, equivalent to a master locksmith, and he builds his own picks. I am not the best lockpicker, but I bet that even I could open bike locks as quickly as he does, if only I had "the tool that [he] and BosnianBill made" in my fingers. Indeed, the community has talked quite a bit about the tool, and perhaps we'll get a 2020 gift in either a commercially-available version or public specifications for building them at home [0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/lockpicking/comments/atf3ef/so_that...

Ride something from the early 80s, before they went to neon colors.

I've seen thieves cut street signs and sturdy bike racks to take a bike. I don't really see this material working for relatively thin bars like a regular U-lock. The base material is aluminum which is relatively soft. Thieves would just switch to shearing action tools to cut through it and if the bar isn't very thick they'd probably only encounter 1 or 2 of the ceramic beads and push them away through the soft metal. They might even use a portable torch to soften it up before cutting.

Conceivably you could have a thick Proteus core with a thick hardened steel casing but it makes the lock either unwieldy or terribly expensive. Maybe they will be able to embed the ceramic beads directly in hardened steel, making it lighter and more resistant to cutting.

We definitely mind, we're just too polite to tell you. Knowing your friend spends thousands (plural) on their bike makes you feel bad about not wanting their "clean" tires, which definitely didn't roll through dog turds and cat pee on the way there, on your floors.

I've managed to keep my bike locked up outside OVERNIGHT in San Francisco (Washington & Polk St.) for a year now. How I did it? The short version: one very good lock (Viro Euromonolith + Peewag security chain, $175), a second good lock (kryptonite, $90), and an okay lock (Abus, to keep them from stealing the basket, $60).

I've also had 3 bikes stolen, the rear wheel stolen, the basket stolen, the front brake stolen, the seat stolen, but now with all the locks there is much less stealing.

Not sure I follow, I take it by implication you have renter's or homeowner's insurance, in which case your replacement cost is the deductible - and $400 is a common deductible. Now, getting a bike set up the way you had yours is a pain, granted. I think it's pretty unlikely that even desperate thieves would saw through your frame, they want to be able to resell as much of the bike as they can, and the frame is a fairly valuable component...

Yeah an ebike can be considerably more heavy. What I had in mind for my description was something like a full carbon road frame and fork, Shimano 105 current generation components or the sram equivalent, and a good quality lightweight wheelset.