6 ms·
Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
- idiliv 3y ago"Each atomic step would normally take over 5,000 CPU hours on a supercomputer. Now, we can do the same calculation in 2 milliseconds on a desktop," Is this phrase equivalent to "Each atomic step would take 5,000 hours on a desktop. Now, it takes 2 CPU milliseconds on a supercomputer."? ^^
- chr1 3y agoNo, they have developed new software wich works much faster. See a few paragraphs above the one you are quoting.
- alacritas0 3y agoI read it as: for the same calculation, what would have previously taken 5,000 CPU cores * hours ran on a supercomputer can now be run in 2 milliseconds on a desktop. Or about roughly 10 orders of magnitude faster
- kragen 3y agono, if you swap the computers around the difference grows rather than staying the same
- tbruckner 3y agoIt's dolomite, baby!
- yellottyellott 3y agoI'm 40% dolomite!
- pohl 3y agoLike Professor Farnsworth, my first thought was also Rudy Ray Moore.
- dekken_ 3y agoobligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfgKJ9G_2fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfgKJ9G_2fg
- constantly 3y agoThe tough black mineral that won’t cop out when there’s heat all about!
- WalterBright 3y agohttps://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072895/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072895/
- ge96 3y agoI'm glad someone wrote this ha That poor dog
- ChuckMcM 3y agoThis is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way. If so it would cut the cost of silicon solar cells significantly (a big chunk of their cost is the cost of the ingot, the ingot cost is a function of time to produce, producing them quickly would get more ingots per unit time from a given reactor). Another crystal structure that would be useful would be sapphire for things like sapphire screens and other covers.
- dilawar 3y agoOne of the authors on LinkedIn definately thinks so. Looks like more papers are coming https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wenhao-sun-20383b7b_ten-years-ago-as-a-phd-student-i-became-activity-7133871765046403072-zbaS?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wenhao-sun-20383b7b_ten-years....
- kergonath 3y ago> This is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way. No really. The way we grow silicon crystals is already very efficient and would not be improved by this sort of thing. We grow them by pulling a seed (in carefully controlled conditions, with a bit of twisting and other tweaks, but still), adding dissolutions steps would waste a lot of time. Besides, the defects they get rid of by dissolution (say, a magnesium atom on a calcium site, which we call antisite defects) do not exist in silicon, in which all atoms are identical. > Another crystal structure that would be useful would be sapphire for things like sapphire screens and other covers. Again, sapphire is something that is quite easy to grow. And like for silicon, it does not have any antisite defects. One of the limitations with growing sapphire is its purity, and it would not be improved by additional dissolution steps. I am not saying that similar steps could not be used to help produce industrially relevant crystals, just that silicon and sapphire are very unlikely to be examples of that. This is a way to grow in a lab in weeks a crystal that would take millions of years to grow in nature. It would not really help with crystals that grow already very efficiently, and whose growth is controlled by other mechanisms.
- kragen 3y ago
- adaml_623 3y ago"A dollar might go further in a Dolamite account... " - Jingle for the genx Aussies
- johnbatin 3y agoFor those people, who also wondered what dolomite exactly was, beside a mountain range: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolomite_(mineral) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolomite_(mineral)
- JKCalhoun 3y agoSaw some beautiful dolomite bluffs along the Katy Trail in Missouri earlier this year. (Until I saw a sign talking about them I had assumed they were limestone.) These are along the Missouri River — so no doubt a historically flooding/drying spot that they mentioned in the article.
- lithos 3y agoIt's amazing they failed to have a picture of either the sample or the mineral in the article.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _xerces_ 3y agoFor those people not on mobile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolomite_(mineral) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolomite_(mineral)
- willcipriano 3y agoFurther reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolemite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolemite
- xer0x 3y agoWho is he?
- defrost 3y agoWenhao Sun: https://mse.engin.umich.edu/people/whsun https://mse.engin.umich.edu/people/whsun https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PD6xwoEAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PD6xwoEAAAAJ&hl=en
- bctria 3y ago"the tough, black mineral that won't cop out when there's heat all about" -Prof. H. Farnsworth
- rsa4046 3y agoReally glad to see this work and result. My PhD dissertation 25 years ago (pub cited in group's Science paper) focused on laboratory synthesis of dolomite at lower temperatures (less than hydrothermal), but since then focused on virtual (kinetic Monte Carlo simulations) experiments as a means of understanding crystal growth. Really happy to see this fundamental progress.
- xkcd1963 3y agoThat is very nicely explained, easy to understand and informative.
- slowhadoken 3y agoI'm 60% dolomite
- saiya-jin 3y agoThis could potentially spell a long-term sustainability of most climbing crags in the world, which are on some form of limestone/dolimite or similar. What happens is that thousands of climbing shoes with tiny bits of dirt eventually polish many holds, altering the routes and always for the worse since those really polished parts that everybody has to use become unreliable and everybody avoids them like plague. I was thinking of spraying a thin film of some acid or similar to make surface rough again, but this eventually wears down the rock (although it could probably last few centuries till you run out of it). Anybody knows about anything actually being done, instead of me just fantasizing?
- WWLink 3y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EB0LyBLULyw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EB0LyBLULyw Obligatory snoop dog video lol
- denton-scratch 3y ago> the White Cliffs of Dover ...and here I stopped reading. Thw White Cliffs of Dover are famously chalk, and not dolomite.
- rob74 3y agoTIL that the mineral dolomite is not named after the Dolomite mountains in Italy, but the other way round, the mineral being named after the geologist who discovered it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9odat_Gratet_de_Dolomieu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9odat_Gratet_de_Dolomieu). Which of course begs the question of how the mountains were called before dolomite was discovered, apparently "pale mountains" ("monti pallidi").