“one fifth the mass” is not the same thing as “five times lighter”
Consider something that weighs half as much. It’s 50% lighter … 0.5 times lighter. Something that weighs 0.2 times as much has 20% of the weight, and is 80% lighter. If it weighed 1% as much, it would be 99% lighter (0.99 times lighter). If it was 100% lighter … it would weigh nothing. Five times lighter would be -4 times the original mass.
We already have accurate and precise ways to describe less mass (albeit leaving aside for the moment the distinction between mass and weight). It’s no harder to say “one fifth” than “five times”, but only one is correctly describing what is going on.
You’re right that we have precise ways to say this, but people like seeing bigger numbers rather than smaller ones, and most people aren’t “precise” about anything.
Consider something that weighs half as much. It’s 50% lighter … 0.5 times lighter.
It’s a relative metric, not an absolute one. And since they’re using the word “lighter” (i.e. less massive) it means that they’re talking about the reciprocal of mass.
I.e. 1/5 the mass = 5 times “lighter”
If something is 50% the mass of something else, you could say the the heavier one is twice as heavy as the light one. Which means that the light one is two times “lighter” than the heavy one.
But I agree with your sentiment, relative comparisons of reciprocals is confusing at the best of times.
It’s not the word “lighter” that’s the issue, it’s the word “less”. If I say something weighs 80% less, … you know how much that is. 100% less, it weighs even less – nothing at all. 500% less (i.e. 5 times less), suddenly it weighs more?
Always a little annoyed at articles like this; “strength” doesn’t tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I’ll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg
You won't find that level of detail in typical articles, because they are intended for the general public and are intended to be an overview that a layman can comprehend.
However, the paper itself, which the article links to, has more detail including deformation testing.
I told myself I wouldn’t read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.
But that’s not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don’t know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I’d just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg
If they are writing using proper materials terminology then strength tells you a lot, since it has a pretty rigorous definition: amount of energy absorbed before failure.
Which, given one of the researchers themselves is quoted talking about its strength, I’m guessing they are even unintentionally being more precise than you’re expecting of them.
As for the properties: smaller sections being stronger is fairly normal amongst materials. The smaller a manufactured section, the more catastrophic any given defect will be. At a certain scale, you will be guaranteed to have either perfect, or already failed, material.
What would such an increased photosynthesis rate mean for soil degradation? Would we need more fertilizer because the plants need to support that growth?
One species of red algae, Griffithsia monilis (Gm), contains Rubisco which is 30% more efficient at fixing carbon than Rubisco in other organisms, including terrestrial crops. For at least 20 years, scientists have been interested in transplanting the highly efficient GmRubisco into plants such as rice, wheat, soybean, and tobacco to increase their productivity; however, until now, no one has been able to successfully coax plants to express it. This is because Rubisco requires multiple “chaperones” that are essential for the protein to fold, assemble and be active – there are seven such helpers in tobacco plants – and most of the chaperones in red algae are unknown, Gunn said
In their study, Gunn and her co-authors were able to solve the 3D structure of GmRubisco and use this information to successfully graft a small number of regions from Rhodobacter sphaeroides (RsRubisco) into a bacterial Rubisco.
A little tldr for anyone struggling with that awful mobile site
Another on a long line of “breakthrough” work that will never be commercialized and doesn’t deliver on its promises. Flow batteries are unlikely to be a solution we ever use.
"Our iMPI scanner is so small and light that you can take it almost anywhere,” Vogel explains.
Obviously when they say “radiation free” they mean “ionizing radiation free”. The term “electromagnetic radiation” includes things like radio waves and visible light, not just high energy ionizing stuff like UV, x-rays, and gamma rays. Literally everything emits some amount of non-ionizimg radiation. Non ionizing EM is pretty harmless unless you have enough of it to cause heating/burns.
I wasn’t speaking to people like you when I explained radiation. I was speaking to everyone who can’t distinguish this from magic. You’ll also have to understand that tissue heating is a concern in some instances, as is “running around in a large magnetic gradient”. (Guess what happens?)
Vogel has something to sell. The whole article explicitly uses words that the lay public will misunderstand to attract attention in the popular press. This whole article is a puff piece. It’s based on real science, but it is not intended to give the reader an accurate picture of what he’s selling.
There are small MRs that you can move on the back of a semi or keep in a room adjacent to an OR. That’s what he’s saying when you translate this statement into something that remotely resembles the truth.
> Such nanoparticles do not occur naturally in the human body and must be administered as markers
So if I’m reading this right, much like radioactive markers, these must be surgically implanted before they can capture the imaging? In other words, it’s not a direct replacement for MRI or X-ray imaging technologies, though it could potentially be safer for long term care patients that need frequent imaging.
Not implanted, just injected into a vessel with a needle or catheter. Any time you introduce something like this into the blood though, there are consequences. X-Ray contrast reactions can be lethal and MRI contrast (more similar to these since it’s metal-based) occasionally kills the arteries going to kidneys, which is bad. So, it’s easy to administer, but this is far too soon to claim it is safe at scale.
I had a CT scan after an accident, and no one told me what contrast is going to feel like, the nurse simply injected me without any explanation.
And omfg, that might’ve been one of the scariest 30 seconds of my life. It felt like I was injected with straight up lava. My whole body was burning from the inside, and I felt like I would just spontaneously combust any second. It very quickly subsided though and there was no negative reaction overall, just higher sensitivity than average. But holy shit, I would want to know about stuff like this beforehand.
I wish the article touched on the nano particles more… like, what happens to them after you’re done? Are they dissolved or expelled (or do they pile up in various parts of the body and cause chronic issues…)?
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