4 ms·

Finding Complex Metal Oxides for Technology Advancement

58 points by theafh 5y ago

mensetmanusman 5y ago
This is really cool, most people don’t know we have essentially explored <0.01% of possible materials of interest for humans. These numbers explode when you consider: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_entropy_alloys https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_entropy_alloys
- jalino23 5y ago
  this is super cool. I'm really hoping we discover programmable smell to add immersion in VR so like speakers but for smell. that be super cool!
- lend000 5y ago
  Considering there are estimated to be on the order 10^60 "small" organic molecules (molecular weight of under 500g/mol) that are stable under some "reasonable" conditions [0], even that may be a pretty big understatement. Just consider all of the combinations of polymers possible from those molecules. For reference: ~10^80 particles in the observed universe. And that's ignoring proteins (average molecular weight ~40000g/mol) and many bio-material applications. A strand of DNA has 4^Length permutations. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1098-1128(199601)16:1%3C3::AID-MED1%3E3.0.CO;2-6 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1098-1128(...
- savant_penguin 5y ago
  I mean, by the same standard I'd guess we also haven't said a large portion of all phrases that have meaning When things get combinatorial I'm not sure percentages really matter
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    That just means it is unlikely we would understand other cultures immediately if we could time travel:) Maybe the difference with materials is that there are almost certainly hidden gems that could improve the lives of humanity, e.g. by helping contain fusion reactors (stars on earth).
wanderingmind 5y ago
High throughput material discovery is one of the biggest fad in academia that has been draining money for decades. They started with high throughput experiments, then combined it with physics based modelling and now ML. However not a single industrial relevant material has been created in decades but hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted. The trouble is most of them cannot be manufactured at scale because they are some crazy metastable state that can only be achieved at lab scale. Further, when manufacturing at scale, materials will have impurities, defects and the properties of such exotic complex oxides are highly sensitive to such changes. As a result hundreds to thousands of papers are published every year and nothing happens except the professors getting rich and graduate students graduating either unemployed or going to become software engineers. Another reason to remove the incentives to create PhD from slave labour.
- teslaberry 5y ago
  interesting comment. is there an industrial -real-world- useaege for compute and ML in discovering new materials. if so , where and how would it start? is there a massive gulf between material science in academia and real world industrial scale material science? or is this just a specific area of detachment. what's your background? just curious.
- Pention 5y ago
  So what is your suggestion? Stop doing research in this area? Which money gets burned? Yours? Or do you think that this money would have been allocated differently/better?
  - wanderingmind 5y ago
    Ofcourse it's my tax dollars that's getting burnt through this useless endeavour. Academic funding must be for bold ideas that are more likely to fail but push the knowledge boundaries further. There is nothing being learnt by mindless number crunching that is done in such work. Infact this is worse than buying lottery tickets hoping to hit a jackpot.
- plaidfuji 5y ago
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
> For example, silicon’s crystal structure allows it to be widely used in the semiconductor industry, whereas graphite’s soft, layered structure makes for great pencils. Having read of lots of exciting uses for graphite, I was not expecting that sentence to end with pencils.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Perhaps you're thinking of graphene?
xvilka 5y ago
Combining traditionally inorganic material science, e.g. metals or their oxides together with proteins and polysaccharides could produce even more interesting materials with unusual properties, that might find applications in prosthetics, building, and aerospace. See, for example, the idea to use chitin for building Martian bases[1]. [1] https://phys.org/news/2020-09-chitin-bioinspired-material-tools-mars.html https://phys.org/news/2020-09-chitin-bioinspired-material-to...

58 points by theafh 5y ago

This is really cool, most people don’t know we have essentially explored <0.01% of possible materials of interest for humans. These numbers explode when you consider: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_entropy_alloys https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_entropy_alloys

jalino23 5y ago
this is super cool. I'm really hoping we discover programmable smell to add immersion in VR so like speakers but for smell. that be super cool!
lend000 5y ago
Considering there are estimated to be on the order 10^60 "small" organic molecules (molecular weight of under 500g/mol) that are stable under some "reasonable" conditions [0], even that may be a pretty big understatement. Just consider all of the combinations of polymers possible from those molecules. For reference: ~10^80 particles in the observed universe. And that's ignoring proteins (average molecular weight ~40000g/mol) and many bio-material applications. A strand of DNA has 4^Length permutations. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1098-1128(199601)16:1%3C3::AID-MED1%3E3.0.CO;2-6 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1098-1128(...
savant_penguin 5y ago
I mean, by the same standard I'd guess we also haven't said a large portion of all phrases that have meaning When things get combinatorial I'm not sure percentages really matter
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  That just means it is unlikely we would understand other cultures immediately if we could time travel:) Maybe the difference with materials is that there are almost certainly hidden gems that could improve the lives of humanity, e.g. by helping contain fusion reactors (stars on earth).

wanderingmind 5y ago

High throughput material discovery is one of the biggest fad in academia that has been draining money for decades. They started with high throughput experiments, then combined it with physics based modelling and now ML. However not a single industrial relevant material has been created in decades but hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted. The trouble is most of them cannot be manufactured at scale because they are some crazy metastable state that can only be achieved at lab scale. Further, when manufacturing at scale, materials will have impurities, defects and the properties of such exotic complex oxides are highly sensitive to such changes. As a result hundreds to thousands of papers are published every year and nothing happens except the professors getting rich and graduate students graduating either unemployed or going to become software engineers. Another reason to remove the incentives to create PhD from slave labour.

teslaberry 5y ago
interesting comment. is there an industrial -real-world- useaege for compute and ML in discovering new materials. if so , where and how would it start? is there a massive gulf between material science in academia and real world industrial scale material science? or is this just a specific area of detachment. what's your background? just curious.
Pention 5y ago
So what is your suggestion? Stop doing research in this area? Which money gets burned? Yours? Or do you think that this money would have been allocated differently/better?
- wanderingmind 5y ago
  Ofcourse it's my tax dollars that's getting burnt through this useless endeavour. Academic funding must be for bold ideas that are more likely to fail but push the knowledge boundaries further. There is nothing being learnt by mindless number crunching that is done in such work. Infact this is worse than buying lottery tickets hoping to hit a jackpot.
plaidfuji 5y ago

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

> For example, silicon’s crystal structure allows it to be widely used in the semiconductor industry, whereas graphite’s soft, layered structure makes for great pencils. Having read of lots of exciting uses for graphite, I was not expecting that sentence to end with pencils.

cinntaile 5y ago
Perhaps you're thinking of graphene?

xvilka 5y ago

Combining traditionally inorganic material science, e.g. metals or their oxides together with proteins and polysaccharides could produce even more interesting materials with unusual properties, that might find applications in prosthetics, building, and aerospace. See, for example, the idea to use chitin for building Martian bases[1]. [1] https://phys.org/news/2020-09-chitin-bioinspired-material-tools-mars.html https://phys.org/news/2020-09-chitin-bioinspired-material-to...