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Transparent Aluminum a Reality

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the how-quaint dept.

TuballoyThunder writes "Many of us remember the scene from Star Trek IV where Scotty barters the formula for transparent aluminum for a small run. It now appears that we can now add transparent aluminum to the science fact column."

5 of 759 comments (clear)

  1. IPOD nano needs this stuff by blackomegax · · Score: 5, Insightful

    seriously. give the nano a nice coat of this and i think apple's little scratching post will turn into something nice and...well...scratchless

  2. Re:Super Polish by TeknoHog · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Actually, strength from polishing is a pretty basic idea in material science. It comes down to the fact that materials break due to initial cracks that grow bigger under stress. If the cracks are initially larger, the material is more fragile.

    For example, a glass bottle can be broken by putting a little sand into it and shaking vigorously. It's mainly the scraping action, not the weight of the sand, that causes the glass to break.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  3. Re:Unintended joke? by somersault · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it's crazy how many people use loose instead of lose though. All those lil kids and wikipedians online these days are so impressionable you know, and the more instances that slide through, the more the problem will propagate. Capital punishment seems to be the way to go.

    --
    which is totally what she said
  4. Re:Aluminium Reality or Aluminum Realty? by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here's the funny thing about language - it changes. Sometimes for a good reason, sometimes for a bad reason. Resisting that will doom you to a life of, well, posting frustrated comments on slashdot complaining about how people spell aluminum. In particular, this "mispronunciation" is about 100 years old, and no amount of slashdot posting is going to change that. Move on.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  5. Standards compliance by SkippyTPE · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's amazing to me how many in the Slashdot crowd will jump up and down screaming about standards compliance until it comes to written English, whereupon the rules (i.e. - standards) are apparently taken as meaningless.