A stack of alternating graphene and layers of this material would be interesting - we're starting to get into mass produced molecular level materials engineering.
> 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
Sounds like they could just layer it to create very strong lightweight structures.
https://www.bikeradar.com/news/airbike-nylon-bicycle-first-l...
> Two British engineers have designed a bike, christened the Airbike, made entirely of nylon – and they claim it’s as strong as steel.
(Did you actually mean to ask "can nylon form rigid 3D structures that can be substituted for a girder in a skyscraper or bridge?")
Emphasis added.
> "Another key feature of 2DPA-1 is that it is impermeable to gases. While other polymers are made from coiled chains with gaps that allow gases to seep through, the new material is made from monomers that lock together like LEGOs, and molecules cannot get between them."
However, this is yet another example of how excessive corporatization of academia can block the adoption and spread of new technologies created with taxpayer funds:
> "The research was funded by the Center for Enhanced Nanofluidic Transport (CENT) an Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Army Research Laboratory."
> "The researchers have filed for two patents on the process they used to generate the material..."
So, who gets access to these patents? It should be the case that MIT be required to license these patents to any American citizen who is interested, non-exclusively, for free, as it was American taxpayers who financed this project.
Similarly, the actual paper is hidden behind a paywall at Nature, so independent researchers without an institutional affiliation have no access to the details without paying ridiculous fees; the paper wasn't uploaded to arxiv and isn't yet on sci-hub, and why not? So some publishers can extract fees for their decrepit business model?
Sci-hub_se does at least have copies of some of the references cited in the paper, if you search for this one you'll get the background (2009): "Two-Dimensional Polymers: Just a Dream of Synthetic Chemists?"
> "The fact that one can now isolate and investigate the natural 2D polymer graphene begs the question as to whether such intriguing structures could also be synthesized. [5] This question is not limited to whether one can synthesize graphene—this would be just one target of the entire family of 2D polymers, although admittedly an especially compli- cated and challenging one. It is meant much more general in the sense: Can one provide reliable and broadly applicable concepts to tackle the synthetic and analytical issues associ- ated with the creation of polymers which meet the structural characteristics of graphene (that is, one repeating unit thick, covalently bonded, and long-range order). Clearly, this would constitute a substantial advance for chemistry in particular, and the molecular sciences in general"
There should be more research into the impact of micro plastic particles. That doesn't mean we should stop research into new applications. These things can, and should, happen in parallel.
Material science is providing a wide range of new and exciting options that go above and beyond what we could do only a few years ago. Dismissing something with essentially no understanding whatsoever is not helpful.
Some researcher building the next superplastic pauses to say "hey that's funny" and bam we've got a new formula that completely prevents the formation of microplastics.
Artificially constraining development is a great way to either miss an important direction of research that will unknowingly solve our problems OR just kill the industry leaving us with our existing plastics that degrade into microplastics.
Of course new developments should definitely run a microplastics study to make sure we don't make the situation worse. However "no more this until that" is a great way to freeze ourselves into our current less than ideal state for decades longer than we have to be here.
I have a growing pile of now useless phones even at my house that I never broke because I take care of my investments.
And while I wouldn't expect a company to search out "right" solutions, I would hope that MIT as an educational institution could see beyond money and at least get in front of where the hockey puck should be, and not where it's tended to go (I'm speaking of sustainable profits on a planet in which we can live vs just amazing profits on an uninhabitable planet).
Processors in phones haven't been changing much over the last few years. CPU throttling to deal with battery degradation is where most of the slowdown comes from.
Although, ultimately, this feels like a market/advertising issue over a technical issue. While I'm not convinced a 100% recycle phone will ever be a likelihood; surely we can get to 90%. Or slow down the trash generation with the aforementioned modular phone.
However it's going to require people to want to spend money on such a thing and also industry to want to produce and advertise such a thing. None of which seems like it's happening anytime soon.
pile of useless phones as an investment is some rather novel idea.
I also have few old ones but they're not useless, each is relegated to controlling particular gadget. Camera, drone, etc.
The strength advantage would be more like layers of carbon fiber cloth compared to loose fiberglass fibers. Even with the same resin the sheets have a significant advantage structurally.
>The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.
ie: the existing polymers use 1D chains, not 3D.
The thermosetting polymers are initially synthesized as 1D chains, but after they are made into their intended form, the curing reaction cross-links all the 1D chains into a 3D network.
Because of its 3D structure, a cured thermosetting polymer can no longer be dissolved or melted. At high temperatures it will decompose or burn, instead of melting.
However, the thermosetting polymers, unlike covalent crystals like diamond, boron or silicon, have a 3D structure with big holes in it, so they are permeable to gases and other substances with small molecules.
The 2D polymer discussed in the parent article has a 2D structure similar to graphite sheets, i.e. a dense 2D lattice, without holes or pores.
This dense structure allows applications that cannot be done with traditional polymer coatings. This coating should be inpermeable like a glass, without being fragile.
The fact that it is light, as mentioned in the title, is pretty much irrelevant, because this is a material that is suitable only for coatings on objects made of other materials, not for the bulk material of an object.
However, single crystals are inconvenient as materials, because growing a crystal (i.e. self-assembling it) is a slow process.
Moreover, growing a single crystal so that it will have some useful form is difficult for a few forms and impossible for most forms.
Therefore the normal way to make something from a single crystal is by growing a large crystal and then removing much of it, leaving only the desired form.
Because of this disadvantages, making anything out of a self-assembled 3D lattice, a.k.a. crystal, is restricted to a few applications where the properties of a single crystal are essential, i.e. various electronic or optical devices.
In most cases, the most convenient materials are either thermoplastic materials, i.e. metals, glasses or thermoplastic polymers, or materials that are produced in a soft plastic state and after forming they can be transformed into a hard state by some treatment, i.e. ceramics, cements or thermosetting polymers.
A disordered 3D lattice is an amorphous material, e.g. a glass (unlike a crystal, which is obtained by very slow cooling, to allow time for the self-assembling of the ordered lattice, a glass is obtained by very fast cooling, which does not allow time for ordered self-assembling) or a thermosetting polymer.
Just because something was financed by taxpayer money does not mean it should be free. It is definitely not a rule or how things work. Although I am curious what are the disadvantages of making it free, I bet there are some, even if lightweight.
Not sure how many patents are held in limbo by govt, but well crafted rules about just a sales tax on products that include govt patented techs could be a plausibly fair way to recoup research investments while making them free to innovation. It's somewhere between the way the (pernicious) RIAA/FACTOR collects royalties on music via surcharges on broadcast and streaming, old "shareware" licenses, and the viral aspect of the GPL, but instead it's via a sales tax.
It could be a unique case for opening up patent archives but then adding a niche licensing and import/export tax on products that use the govt patented materials or technology. Even though I think the idea of using taxes as incentives is fundamentally broken, and there is someting dystopian about universities effectively collecting private taxes through the patent system, in a case like technology transfer, it opens up the tech for innovation and doesn't collect until revenue and profit are realized. It's tax revenue a govt has actually earned by investing, so there is even a plausible libertarian case for it.
The problem with the plastics industry, the reason so many people are fed up with it, is the 'understanding' you speak of tends to lag their industrial application by many years. So we end up with a whole lot of "X is now known to have bad properties, but we already use too much of it to change now." For instance, virtually every thermoset plastic in use today is impossible to recycle, but there seems to be no going back. Their use continues to proliferate.
My understanding is that microplastics are a result of regular wear and tear, and I don't think a material exist that is immune to that. If anything, a new plastic formula may be created that hardens it enough to reduce the shedding to a negligible level.
In retrospect, I regret it; I saved those PCs from going to the dump, but:
- They were not power-efficient
- Because the hardware was a decade old, they had poor connectivity options
I used to seek out computers that were maximally upgradeable. But in practice, the only thing I ever upgraded was disk and memory. I still have a box of obsolete memory cards. Stuff gets obsolete very quickly these days.
What do you mean these days? Computers used to obsolete within months in the 90s as ever-faster CPUs kept coming out.
No longer true, with the death of Moore's Law. Computers from 2010 are still quite usable (I have several, servers & laptop) since speed increases over the last decade are incremental at best.
I've been buying computers since the 80s and now is the golden age of longevity for equipment.
I wish devices were made to last for at least 10years, only my modular desktop with haswell gen CPU has lasted that long. I downgraded it from daily to something else.
Which is all to say, I understand why we want modularity, but - for most computer users - a much more necessary path forward is a reimagining omaterials recyclability.