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Petrified Wood In Days, Not Millions Of Years
prostoalex writes "Any petrified wood enthusiast would tell you that a quality product takes millions of years to mature, following Mother Nature's course, which, of course, is very frustrating for anyone experimenting. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory now managed to get the process in few days, USA Today says. The scientific achievement will be beneficial for "separating industrial chemicals, filtering pollutants and soaking up contamination"."
A piece of wood in the shape of Natalie Portman... naked and petrified!
Does this word exactly replicate petrified wood? Have they tried carbon dating the samples? Could this lead to some debate about how accurate our picture of the world based on carbon dating really is?
And queue the hordes of unbelieveably improbable scenario spinning creationist kooks...nnnnnnnow!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Now I can build that petrified wood computer case I've always wanted!
Ah, but you would have other problems blasting your nuclear waste. When it decays, it gives off radioactivity (hence the problem). But that is what lets it decay. If you could accelerate it, wouldn't you simply be causing a large burst of radioactive energy when you did it? Couldn't that be worse than buring it encased in lead in some anicent salt mines?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Without thinking this though properly -- i think that you could just encase the whole setup that would blast the nuclear waste in lead during the procedure. Any energy should then go towards heating up the lead, which in itself is harmless.
Sounds like a definite candidate for this year's Ig Noble prize in biology.
There would be hell of a lot less nuclear "waste" if they only reprocessed it. I think only 1% or so of uranium is "burned" (decays) in nuclear reactor. A nuclear reactor only generates a few pounds of actual waste per year.
Any petrified wood enthusiast
A what now? Those exist?!
I'm still waiting for my fake/real diamonds! $5 a carrat my ASS!
Frigging diamond cartels! I wanna cut some glass!
My hope of having petrified wood delivered to my door in under a week is now closer to reality!
1. You didn't reference the verse, or the version correctly! It's verse 19, and KJV.
2. More contemporary versions accurately use the pronoun 'they' where you've quoted 'he.'
3. In the KJV, if it really meant God, it would have said He, not he.
But you a) don't care, and b) just wanted to sound smart, didn't you?
For future reference, the Bible can be found on line in many translations, searchable at http://bible.gospelcom.net/
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
...but she might be naked and petrifying, as in, Medusa. Stony glares and all.
"The relationship was rocky. She was a hard woman, but loved to be pored."
It does lend new meaning to the (search) phrase "stoned chick".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
On top of that, you have odd cases like pieces of non-petrified wood sticking up out of the ground in France or embedded in Hawkesbury sandstone in Australia. These have all been carbon-dated and returned answers in the thousand-of-years range, which seems to indicate either that some of the assumptions about initial conditions are badly wrong, or ideas about how rapidly landforms find themselves reshaped are badly wrong.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Or did you not just advocate condemning someone for improving the world's knowledge of petrified wood?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Due to their differing masses, C12 and C14 behave slightly differently in chemical reactions. This can be enough to cause natural fractionation of various kinds.
However, you don't need to change the half-life of C14 to radically alter the numbers you get out of C-ratio dating. AMS dating did it all in one hit by simply counting the atoms correctly, 4eg, and any one of a dozen known natural processes (to say nothing of the preparation samples go through before analysis) can also alter the ratios on the fly.
He and Rb/Sr and other isotopic-ratio dating methods suffer from similar weaknesses. Unfortunately nobody was there at the time with instruments, and it's a bit late to start any calibration experiments now.
The second paragraph also runs into a few technical issues, beginning with the observation that bombarding anything is likely to cause even more radioactive waste, like the Cat in the Hat trying to clean up the excess Pink, or the Help Stamp Out Mercury movement.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yes, they exist - and your favourite hobbies might appear as totally bizarre to them (amongst others) as to you. Some petrified wood is opalescent and quite beautiful when polished up. I'm not specifically a fan of it, but dear old Dad is a rock-hound and has some breath-taking pieces in his collection.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You just need to get the desired ration of C-14 into the food chain. With mice you can feed them on yeast or algae pills made, at least partially, in an artificial environment. With a pine tree however, you'd have to operate a sealed 20m - 30m tall environmental chamber for 30 to 40 years with the special C-14 rich atmosphere the whole time.
Obviously you'd need a shorter time if you're wanting a smaller tree or smaller wooden object. Ten years ought to give you a tree more than large enough for a spork, be it 200 000 years old or 2 million.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
It would be great if they could make a petrified bokken. Maybe fund more research with sales.
Would we have to call it a sekka no bokutou. (does slashdot allow shift-JIS?)
I wonder what effect the acid bath might have. Would it maintain enough shape to make it worth it, or would we end up with a thin misshapen stick?
Full Text in Advanced Materials
I love that you can always find the USA today equivalent on slashdot, but never anything more in depth, doesnt this site cater to nerds?
2*31*37*263
And would it be better to petrify the logs, then build the cabin, or build the cabin and then petrify it? Just slip a hug baggie over it, pump it full of gas...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Well I guess this is another use for Viagra.
--"Sorry for the inconvience." Gods Last Words to his Creation
DNA, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
"Any petrified wood enthusiast " I don't speak to people like that...
...I've been well aware of it from the start, but on the other hand bombardment also massively increases the bulk of the waste (turns the substrate and container into waste also) and to a certain extent "randomises" the quantity and nature of the byproducts. Admittedly, it's hard to imagine something more poisonous than Pu.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...lots of it is genuine wood, and whether or not it was contaminated at the surface is irrelevant. The showstopper is that it is wood, which just does not preserve as wood for anything like millions of years.
That puts a ceiling on the phenomenon of maybe tens of thousands of years, possibly at a stretch hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately, orthodox geography will not admit to a landscape changing that fast.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There already exist processes to produce silicon carbide, and with lower porosity. Can SiC be used for deposition of semiconductors, or for creating solar panels? No? Then why is this "news that matters"?
Apparently, the rest of slashdot agrees, based on what people are posting.
Unfortunately, orthodox geography will not admit to a landscape changing that fast.
Yes it does. The Orthodox Church and other Christian organizations have endorsed a belief that the earthquakes that triggered the Great Flood of 1656 (after creation) changed the landscape and the environment to the point of unrecognizability.
Only if there is honest and real competition in the diamond market (even with the synthetics) will you see $5/carat diamonds As it stands now, many of the synthetics seem to cost as much as the real.
As the patents on diamond manufacture start to run out in the 2020s, trust me that the bottom will fall out of the diamond market. Or do you claim that De Beers will hire Cher as the spokeswoman for a proposed patent term extension act?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
E.g. who directly measured the atmospheric C ratios even 200 years ago, let alone thousands?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...orthodox geology.
It turns out that his boat is just the right size (550 feet long) to ride out tsunami-sized waves. Any longer, she'd break; any shorter, she'd tip. Evidently somebody knew a lot about nautical engineering. It seems that the bilges were even self-pumped by the wave motion. Leonardo couldn't have done better.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... but doesn't wood always petrify in a matter of days/weeks. Otherwise it would rot before it petrified. Isn't this just an industrialized process that consistantly does what nature does?
Well, yes, you are wrong. First there really is no time limit on mineralization processes or decay for that matter. The state the wood was in when it was buried, the climate, and ground water chemistry all affect the rate and outcome. Also, there is more than one form of "petrified" wood. Many pieces are really casts of wood fragments and retain only the external form.
Typical replacement minerals are agate and opal, minerals that can be transported and deposited by cold water. However, there are areas where you can look at carbonized tree trunks that are about 10 million years old. You can put a match to a piece and it will burn, rather poorly and malodorously. The logs have visible microfaults through them that are marked by thin veins of quartz. I have also been to one location where it is possible to peel leaves out of water-deposited volcanic ash, leaves that are still completely intact and organic. They were deposited 30 million years ago or so during the Sierran uplift. They aren't petrified at all.
The biggest problem with the story though is that I have never, ever heard of silicone carbide as a mineral of fossilization. As far as I can find, it's a synthetic mineral (not listed in Dana's or Mason Berry), so the "results" can't possibly exactly duplicate petrified wood - in any form. Also, the process described is a high temperature process that is unlike any environment that wood has been known to petrify in.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Update. SiC (Silicon carbide) doea occur in nature - in Nickel-Iron meteorites. It's mineral name is Moissanite (if I got the spelling correct) and it is extremely rare. In any case, it still won't serve as naturally occuring material for fossilization.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
By the way, this means that most or all of petrified wood comes from a catastrophe, not from the "normal" course of events.
No, it doesn't. There's a broad gulph between catastrophic and rapidly occuring events. Landslides for instance are quite fast enough to bury trees and preserve then. So are volcanic eruptions. As are floods and tsunamis. Some of those events may be considered "catastrophes" on a human scale, but they are ALL perfectly normal geological processes. Some, such as floods are more or less annual events.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I've recently started to get into bolo ties, but I've been having trouble with finding quality plaques on line. You don't happen to have any links to places that will sell them online, do you? Most of what I've seen online is crap.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Maybe that could be used as the part of the process to pull the carbon out of natural circulation and reduce CO2 level in atmosphere?
"Tiger's Eye" "Bird's Eye" diseased maple -- no match
"Tiger's Eye" "Bird's Eye" maple -- plenty of matches, here's a good image of Bird's Eye maple (with a reference to Tiger's Eye). Most of the Tiger's Eye examples seem to be in guitars or hi-fi consoles, but there's a reference to a cruise ship with a "tiger's eye maple" table (at playboy.com). There's a barrette for sale, but the Tiger's Eye in it is the stone, not the wood.
Lots of references to Tiger's Eye stone, but the only references to it and petrified wood are comparisons to the process, where portions of stone are replaced with other minerals. There's a nice example of Tiger's Eye quartz, and a slightly more detailed description, including some information about how it is formed (including the comparison to petrified wood).