"The intended application isn't for aircraft carriers this time, but rather for construction projects in remote, cold areas where conventional building methods aren't easy to apply – like the Arctic and Antarctic.
With no concrete or steel required, and with ice and plant-based cellulose as the main ingredients, this could be a building material with a low carbon footprint that's also biodegradable."
Plant-based cellulose, of course, is abundant in these areas, as is the fuel to melt the ice. As for more general trouble with ice buildings, this is probably a good cautionary tale:
"Further down the line, this approach could open up a whole new landscape for materials used in packaging, construction, and more: Using a custom protein to bring two unlikely compounds (ice and cellulose) together."
Ice roads would be one application. Once it freezes, usual ferry services can often no longer be upheld. Then, one has to wait until the ice is thick enough to drive a car over the ice. If there was an easily applicable material to drive on ice less than usual 15-20cm of ice, that would decrease that waiting time quite a bit (and make ice roads/bridges possible in locations that would previously be unsuitable). And since it is ice, you can grow it somewhere else and transport in place with a barge.
It always sounds/looks like a trap to me when I hear about/see people driving whole-ass cars over 15cm ~= half a foot of ice. That's just wrong, and I would barely consider walking on ice that thick (thin).
(I'm telling you I'm from southern California without telling you I'm from southern California)
I have similar prejudices until I was dragged to a Minnesotan winter activity where everyone drives into the middle of a frozen lake and park in a large circle while a bunch of drivers race their cars in circles in the middle. It was surreal.
A guy showed me a video where they used a chainsaw to cut a giant circle in the ice and then used one of the drive wheels on an ATV to make an ice merry-go-round, it looked pretty fun! The long winters make people here in Minnesota a bit funny in the head lol
It’s not safe to drive a car on 6 inches of ice. It’s enough for a snowmobile or single-person ATV. I wouldn’t drive a car onto a frozen lake without 12 inches of ice, 16 inches if it’s a typical half-ton pickup.
I live in MN and have slept overnight on the ice (inside of a heated trailer) before.
Obviously depends on the weight / load per area. Here in Stockholm, our skating club starts organizing trips from 5 cm (=2inch), but black ice should hold you from 3.2 or so cm. And you can hear from the sound of the ice approximately which thickness you are on. But this is done with security equipment and in a group, so more general rules apply to anyone without experience and acting on their own. Ice is dangerous, like the outdoors is always dangerous when taken without necessary precaution.
Obviously you know better than I do, but I'm literally uncomfortable here in bed just reading about skating over ice that thin. I'm going to go think about something else now...
Ask them how big and how many stones they have to skate by that are clearly thrown by people from land who are unsure if the ice is thick enough despite a stone larger having already been thrown.
The article briefly touches on future packaging. Would ice ever be useful in packaging frozen foods? It'd be biodegradable, and would be a sign of trust that the goods have been permanently frozen from packaging to delivery.
You'd literally be able to just throw the trash outside and let it feed your garden, lol.
The integrity check could also make this especially valuable for transporting medication that must remain cold. The current state of the art isn't much more than putting ice packs in a styrofoam cooler.
Another instance of 'Super Ice' or as named in the article 'Pykrete' in science fiction is in Neal Stephenson's Novel from 2015: Seveneves.
The substance is used in space for the construction of temporary habitats.
I suppose this is plausible if you manage to find a large source of ice and bring it into a stable orbit. It won't melt into liquid, and perhaps the reinforcing fibers could help prevent sublimation.
A lot of the novel strained my ability to suspend disbelief, but the overall scope and ambition is so awesome I was able to forgive the poor editing. It's attempting to be hard sci-fi, much of the novel is taken up by technical descriptions that could only appeal to an engineer-minded person.
> A lot of the novel strained my ability to suspend disbelief, but the overall scope and ambition is so awesome
While the 2nd half of the book is definitely still sci-fi territory, the first part is slowly getting into the plausible tech realm, 12 years after the book was written. We now have a much stronger space industry, and probably could match or exceed the payload to orbit in 2 years from the book (if everyone would work towards the same goal, which is still a bit of fantasy but hey...)
You could cleanly think about it in three parts, but the time jump in the middle which involves a whole new set of characters is another way to split it.
Yes the book itself is broken into 3 parts but if you're looking at it from a scientific plausibility scale parts 1 & 2 are in the same vicinity of that scale where part 3 jumps a good ways into more traditional scifi levels of plausibility.
It basically enabled the plot and mostly happened 'off camera'. The parts about the management of radiation was pretty cool though. Because if it I earmarked "Ichi-F: A Worker's Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant" to read later on.
I'm still salty over the Kickstarter he ran about a sword fighting video game that was, at the time, the highest valued project in Kickstarter history, and he just... gave up and released nothing.
This type of ice composite would be super interesting for space structure construction. Melt cometary ice and mix it with additives of some kind and spin big cylinders out of it. You’d just have to make the surface reflective so it doesn’t melt, and possibly have some active cooling which you need anyway if anything inside makes heat.
The outer surface would probably be sprayed with something, maybe just reflective dust, to also keep it from subliming into the vacuum.
Extremely repairable, melts at human and equipment friendly temperatures, recyclable, doubles as an emergency water reservoir, and last but definitely not least a fantastic radiation shield.
Would also work for structures on Mars, the Moon, etc, but I’m a fan of the idea of settling space itself not another planet. Gravity wells are a trap.
I hate how researchers always have to pretend there's a practical application for their inventions. This is clearly never going to replace concrete in any situation. But it's still interesting.
I think all researchers should be forced to consider the practical applications of their work, if they are publicly funded. Don't want to answer those questions, go find your own money.
A local magazine did a test on ice cream cone melting. Some of those were still intact looking after sitting open at room temperature for an hour. Hooray for additives! So it's not a fundamentally new idea. These have to be safe to eat so maybe not too harmful for environment, though you never know.
Some parts of the world use ice roads and have struggled with warm winters. Maybe this could be used to improve the strength and extend time in the spring.
Thanks for the link. I took a look at the wikipedia pages of the gums and they are closer to the modified celulose in the main article than to the polyphenols in the article I linked.
It's very complicated to compare, because they use other sugars and there are a thousand of details that are important, like how long are branchy the molecules are, and also a million of details that are above my chemistry knodledge level.
As a persomal prefference, I'd call that jelly instead of ice cream. (And in a bad day that I want to lie a little just to be mean, I'd call them a piece of cake.)
One night I ended up with a scoop of ice cream I had to discard (I think I dropped it on the floor?) so left it in the sink. The next morning, it was still there. This was quite a decent ice cream, both in terms of flavour and texture; it was some of the gums holding it together. That became my new ice-cream of choice for making an affogatto without the icecream completely melting.
Wonder if this will then be used to fulfill the dream of shooting ice bullets which then melt inside the victim, leaving less evidence. If memory serves, I think the CIA explored this at some remote point in time.
sounds like a problem that might be solvable by a new super ice that is 10x stronger and "can absorb much more energy and deform gradually" instead of disintegrating.
Concrete's not strong enough to be used as a bullet either- you'd need something roughly the size of a shotgun slug. If you're going that big, you aren't going for subtle.
I imagine the boring truth is that, at least in America, getting shot with a normal "boring" bullet is less traceable than something special or something that mysteriously disappears.
It's kind of fascinating how all the bullshit TV copaganda scenes involving forensics have both been A) rightly decried as unrealistic by savvy viewers, and B) still been fairly realistic depictions of the field of forensics.
The farther you go, the faster you need to go to get enough time dilation to make the trip worthwhile. The faster you go, the more the shielding matters. It still applies!
It adds fiber, which is the key. The main weakness of ice as a crystal is that as soon as a crack forms it can spread along imperfections in the crystal structure. Putting fibre in it bridges those gaps and stops the cracks before they can get big enough to cause significant weakening.
Alloying copper with tin to make bronze produces a material which is stronger and more durable than either component, and this works because the tin disturbs the copper's crystal lattice, which restricts the mobility of dislocations, which in turn reduces the plasticity of the alloy.
I do not know if cellulose fibers have a similar effect in ice, but in general, if you can trade the feature that is causing a problem for one that will not, you are improving things.
It's not necessarily a bonus, different sports need completely different ice properties (e.g. figure skating vs hockey), and a managed arena needs ease of maintenance.
Well a carrier is full of equipment. A submarine freezer drone, building a ponton in the middle of a river is just a self achoring box to drive tanks over.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 48.8 ms ] threadWith no concrete or steel required, and with ice and plant-based cellulose as the main ingredients, this could be a building material with a low carbon footprint that's also biodegradable."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century
(I'm telling you I'm from southern California without telling you I'm from southern California)
I live in MN and have slept overnight on the ice (inside of a heated trailer) before.
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/safety/ice/thickness.html
Obviously you know better than I do, but I'm literally uncomfortable here in bed just reading about skating over ice that thin. I'm going to go think about something else now...
Ask them how big and how many stones they have to skate by that are clearly thrown by people from land who are unsure if the ice is thick enough despite a stone larger having already been thrown.
(one of, if not the most experienced ice skater in the world having a blast)
You'd literally be able to just throw the trash outside and let it feed your garden, lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine
The substance is used in space for the construction of temporary habitats. I suppose this is plausible if you manage to find a large source of ice and bring it into a stable orbit. It won't melt into liquid, and perhaps the reinforcing fibers could help prevent sublimation.
A lot of the novel strained my ability to suspend disbelief, but the overall scope and ambition is so awesome I was able to forgive the poor editing. It's attempting to be hard sci-fi, much of the novel is taken up by technical descriptions that could only appeal to an engineer-minded person.
While the 2nd half of the book is definitely still sci-fi territory, the first part is slowly getting into the plausible tech realm, 12 years after the book was written. We now have a much stronger space industry, and probably could match or exceed the payload to orbit in 2 years from the book (if everyone would work towards the same goal, which is still a bit of fantasy but hey...)
Mainly I remember skimming the middle third because it felt like such a drag.
Except bringing an asteroid all the way down to the ISS. That part was uncharacteristically thoughtless, I think.
The outer surface would probably be sprayed with something, maybe just reflective dust, to also keep it from subliming into the vacuum.
Extremely repairable, melts at human and equipment friendly temperatures, recyclable, doubles as an emergency water reservoir, and last but definitely not least a fantastic radiation shield.
Would also work for structures on Mars, the Moon, etc, but I’m a fan of the idea of settling space itself not another planet. Gravity wells are a trap.
(I’m sorry.)
Some parts of the world use ice roads and have struggled with warm winters. Maybe this could be used to improve the strength and extend time in the spring.
[1] https://thisismold.com/uncategorized/the-science-behind-the-...
Carob extract and guar gum at least.
It's very complicated to compare, because they use other sugars and there are a thousand of details that are important, like how long are branchy the molecules are, and also a million of details that are above my chemistry knodledge level.
As a persomal prefference, I'd call that jelly instead of ice cream. (And in a bad day that I want to lie a little just to be mean, I'd call them a piece of cake.)
Surely the CIA has untraceable ammo at their disposal already?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAC-46_(handgun)
It's kind of fascinating how all the bullshit TV copaganda scenes involving forensics have both been A) rightly decried as unrealistic by savvy viewers, and B) still been fairly realistic depictions of the field of forensics.
Unless of course you just bend everything around your private bubble with your warp drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
Fun fact: you don't need sawdust for pykrete. Adding any kind of material e.g. just newspapers can help similar to how rebar makes concrete stronger
I do not know if cellulose fibers have a similar effect in ice, but in general, if you can trade the feature that is causing a problem for one that will not, you are improving things.
Adding fibres to already brittle materials improves their resilience to tensile forces mostly
Or are you saying it increase yield strength, because that is a separate property, yes?
Jeez cmon
When there's melting going on at the rink, we're not allowed on the ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_skating#Physical_mechanics...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk