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abc123abc123 10 hours ago [-]
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.
aqme28 9 hours ago [-]
Well no, because these aren't just ice-- it's an ice composite.
tomkarho 5 hours ago [-]
They already have the heart attack gun and half a dozen other gadgets. An ice bullet would be just (pardon the pun) an icing on the cake.
zdragnar 8 hours ago [-]
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.
talon8635 8 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t there still be evidence that some object penetrated the person and ripped them apart and caused them to bleed out?
Surely the CIA has untraceable ammo at their disposal already?
gus_massa 9 hours ago [-]
It's a mix of water and celulose, do it does not disapear completely.
Cerium 9 hours ago [-]
Add some enzymes to help reduce the remaining cellulose?
para_parolu 8 hours ago [-]
Make a bolt and use crossbow
jambalaya8 9 hours ago [-]
I believe they used a different frozen compound than water, but yes.
metadat 9 hours ago [-]
Mythbusters busted ice bullets. IIRC, the ice didn’t tolerate being shot out of a barrel and disintegrated.
john_strinlai 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jonhohle 8 hours ago [-]
Coroners are confused about strange cellulose fibers through the entry and exit wounds. “It looks like they were attacked by… celery.”
Gravityloss 8 hours ago [-]
what if you obtained your target's DNA and grew their flesh to make bullets out of? Add additive, freeze and voila!
john_strinlai 8 hours ago [-]
i think there's an episode of Bones along those lines. maybe it was just a frozen blood bullet? i forget.
ozyschmozy 3 hours ago [-]
The BioPykrete name is kinda funny. As opposed to the regular pykrete, made with the famously not-bio wood pulp
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
Gravityloss 11 hours ago [-]
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.
gus_massa 9 hours ago [-]
Which additive were they using? This article [1] use poliphenols, that are very different from the modified celulose in the top article.
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.)
silverFork 3 days ago [-]
Ok stronger but doesn't it melt.. What are they going to do with it?
patall 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Another is underground tunnel building. In sandy places, there are cases where they freeze the ground when building a concrete structure. If that could be reinforced with stronger ice, it might make working easier.
Similar, you can use ice as an temporary scaffold when e.g building a spanning bridge in winter. Stronger ice => easier application of said scaffold.
xeonmc 5 hours ago [-]
Minecraft iceboat racing coming true?
hn_throwaway_99 8 hours ago [-]
This sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine if I've ever heard one, for the nichest of niche applications.
patall 8 hours ago [-]
I am pretty sure that 99.9% of material science covers very niche applications
mkotlikov 3 days ago [-]
"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."
EA-3167 3 days ago [-]
Climate change feels like a grim reaper slowly stalking the value proposition of this technology.
zomiaen 11 hours ago [-]
Potentially becomes more viable in some locations.
Or a future ice age.
10 hours ago [-]
jazzyjackson 3 days ago [-]
Maybe we’ll be building ice caves on other planets after all
peder 11 hours ago [-]
Or maybe Mars?
moi2388 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly what I wanted. A biodegradable building. I’m making mine out of compost!
raisedbyninjas 11 hours ago [-]
"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."
Sounds like a good candidate for shielding an inter-galactic colony ship.
aeve890 9 hours ago [-]
Inter-galactic? My dude I think you missed a few steps
bmurphy1976 8 hours ago [-]
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!
stronglikedan 7 hours ago [-]
> The faster you go, the more the shielding matters.
Unless of course you just bend everything around your private bubble with your warp drive.
api 12 hours ago [-]
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.
timonoko 6 hours ago [-]
Frozen fish is about the same strength as carbon fiber composite. You need carbide saw to cut it.
11 hours ago [-]
gaiagraphia 13 hours ago [-]
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.
dublinben 11 hours ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
NitpickLawyer 11 hours ago [-]
> 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...)
randallsquared 10 hours ago [-]
> getting into the plausible tech realm
Except bringing an asteroid all the way down to the ISS. That part was uncharacteristically thoughtless, I think.
hermitShell 10 hours ago [-]
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.
macintux 11 hours ago [-]
Side note, but I have a hard time thinking of Seveneves in halves; isn't it 3 distinct parts?
Mainly I remember skimming the middle third because it felt like such a drag.
doginasuit 10 hours ago [-]
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.
rtkwe 10 hours ago [-]
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.
NitpickLawyer 10 hours ago [-]
Heh, true. My brain went into "pre space" and "post space" as halves :)
8note 9 hours ago [-]
pykrete isnt a scifi material. its a ww2 idea the brits had for making an ice based aircraft carrier
The Wikipedia article mentions how this happened with an anti-AIDS medication called ritonavir. I watched this video by Veritasium on that situation a while back; I recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksn5yrsC3Wg
thinkingtoilet 8 hours ago [-]
I literally picked up Cat's Cradle for first time in decades this weekend. Funny how these things line up.
Surely the CIA has untraceable ammo at their disposal already?
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
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.)
Another is underground tunnel building. In sandy places, there are cases where they freeze the ground when building a concrete structure. If that could be reinforced with stronger ice, it might make working easier.
Similar, you can use ice as an temporary scaffold when e.g building a spanning bridge in winter. Stronger ice => easier application of said scaffold.
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."
Unless of course you just bend everything around your private bubble with your warp drive.
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.
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...)
Except bringing an asteroid all the way down to the ISS. That part was uncharacteristically thoughtless, I think.
Mainly I remember skimming the middle third because it felt like such a drag.
(I’m sorry.)