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Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Not now, Madeline!
I noticed you're still working with polymers.
Misleading name, on the same level as calling water "non-explosive hydrogen". That said the material looks promising, as a glass replacement for some applications (the text mentions a few of them, like armoured windows).
(It is not a metal; it's a ceramic, mostly oxygen with bits and bobs of aluminium and nitrogen. Interesting nonetheless, even if I'm picking on the name.)
3 times as tough as steel and they're making bulletproof glass out of it...
There's a low budget pc game about colonizing Mars and this was one of the things in the tech tree
Crazy to see it as a real thing now.
Like OG aluminum, this is going to be crazy expensive at first, but in a century it'll likely be cheap and we'll see it replacing glass in the most mundane uses.
We'll see it replace phone screens pretty quickly tho. A few mm's of this and we'll have legitimately unbreakable screens, and even if a scratch happens, you should be able to just buff it out. They're probably wrap entire phones it honestly. One solid piece that makes repair impossible on your own.
Might be hard to assemble the functional part of a phone inside of a crystal, and you can't bake the whole thing because silicon isn't surviving 2000oC for 2 days.
Yeah, but it was a lot harder to make regular aluminum back in the day as well.
Increasing ductility isn't impossible, but it probably is unlikely in this case.
But two halves that get glued/sealed together permanently would be possible.
wouldnt that stop the radio waves from reaching the phone, like a faraday cage?
Good question. This new material is technically a ceramic, not a metal, so I'd be inclined to say no. But we'd need more information on its electrical properties to say for sure.
The obtained material, which is molded and opaque, is heated to 2000 C and kept at this temperature for two days
Fuck that's a long time and a high temp
Transparent aluminum is so weird, a piece of it was once passed around our office. It felt heavier and colder than I expected, which I guess is probably because it's much denser than most types of glass (I think it's only comparable to optical glass so it would be close to holding a high quality glass lens) and it looks like the thermal conductivity is way higher.
I had no idea this actually existed! Cool!
Here’s a more novice-friendly link: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/03/whats-the-deal-with-transparent-aluminum/
Thanks for that. Really cool stuff.
"Aluminum oxynitride ceramics have been around since the 1980s, so it’s not new stuff by any means."
Says it costs 5X the price of standard bulletproof glass, but that it's far stronger, and IR-transparent. Cool material.
Star trek comes to life, yet again.
This one goes the other way. It was first patented in the 80s before the movie came out. It just wasn't a big thing yet. I assume it's had improved properties since then, but the process already existed.
Unfortunately this is a time travel paradox. It wouldn't have even been patented if the crew hadn't gone back in time and needed it to transport a whale back to the future. I fully support the claim that Star Trek did it first in the future.
So, just as predicted by the Hitchhiker's Guide, the problem begins with whales.
The StarTrek episode with the transparent Aluminium was from 1986, transparent Aluminium was invented in 1985, but at this time they don't have the tecnologic measures to produce significant ammounts. Even today it's relative expensive to produce, ~$15 per Square inch.
This seems cool.
Also upvoted for the correct spelling of Aluminium
The original discoverer of the element spelled it "aluminum". The British publisher that published his work changed the spelling. The rest of the world got the right version of the man's work. The Brits are wrong.
Scotty would be proud.
FWIW, this has been around for about twenty years.
Yeah of course, they learned it in the eighties to be able to rescue some whales I think..
Would that make it a type of sapphire?
Types of corundum maybe but I think that’s a stretch. Sapphire is (usually) blue Al2O3. Ruby is red Al2O3. Transparent aluminum is Al2O27N5.
Aluminum oxynitride is transparent aluminum, but alpha aluminum oxide, which is also transparent, is called Corundum, Ruby, or Sapphire. That name is dumb.
Is this bullshit? Is it April first or something? I actually checked, no kidding!
Scotty is going to be such a badass. I'm glad we have him to look forward to.
Sapphire and Ruby are also transparent aluminum.
It isn¡t but not so strange, even in Nature exist Transparent Aluminium, called Saphires and Rubies. It's called transparent Metal, because of it's atomic structure cristaline, not amorph like normal cristal of an Window. Metal, also Aluminium has a cristaline structure.
It's amazing that LLMs have studied the internet for how humans write articles, and now they type like a fuckin SeO sPeCIaLiST
Great, now my food will be wrapped in transparent aluminum
It says its a ceramic so
Tests show that a laminated pane of ALON 1.6″ thick can stop a 50 caliber rifle round, something even 3.7″ of traditional “bullet-proof” glass can’t do.
Yeah that’ll really protect my food!