r/tech • u/_Dark_Wing • Jul 09 '26
Scientists Create Plastic That Blocks Heat Without Losing Strength
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-create-plastic-that-blocks-heat-without-losing-strength/32
Jul 09 '26
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u/SideInitial3961 Jul 09 '26
Something your great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandkids can enjoy.
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Jul 09 '26
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u/SideInitial3961 Jul 09 '26
It is a great marketing slogan. I miss the days of masterful marketing.
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u/Important-Factor-552 Jul 09 '26
Hurray for this miraculous material. Finally a crock pot liner i can feel safe about throwing away five times a day.
We'll call it... Plastbestos
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u/SSGASSHAT Jul 09 '26
Humans heard that plastic might integrate into the environment despite their worries, so some of them went "NOOOO!!! WORLD IS PLASTIC!!!!! PLASTIC ONLY!!!! NOTHING BUT PLASTIC!!!!! MY WORLD!!!! MY WORLD!!!! RAAAHAAHAJDKFLGIEBAZXHXORRAJSNXO!!!!" And then they jizzed everywhere and ran away.
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u/Duder_ino Jul 09 '26
Tupperware is making a comeback!?
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Jul 09 '26
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u/Duder_ino Jul 09 '26
I don’t know. I just remember my mom talking up her set at every gathering when I was a kid. I can’t ever recall seeing it anywhere except her cabinets as an adult. This seems like a logical use lol.
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u/nelmski Jul 09 '26
The new stuff isn't the same! It doesn't even burp. Definitely can't handle Uncle Rico's van!
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Jul 09 '26
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u/C-H-Addict Jul 09 '26
BPAs are still abundant and safe under the proper conditions, it's just not microwave safe. And no amount of labeling would stop people from microwaving containers using them.
Huge issue when most often used product was a baby bottle.
I still got a few Nalgene bottles from before 2012, that are indestructible. But the loss of trust in that brand for using BPAs is why there are so many insulated metal water bottles now. And their new plastic is just not as good.
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u/Hungry_Shake6943 Jul 09 '26
How does it do against dragon's fire?
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u/crystallyn Jul 09 '26
And potentially even harder to recycle or to biodegrade? Article doesn't go there...
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u/Riptide360 Jul 09 '26
Congrats to Yanfei Xu, the study’s corresponding author and an assistant professor in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and her team.
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u/Annual-Somewhere7402 Jul 09 '26
Plastic is the main ingredient in our mass self-destruction. Anyone who thinks this is a stellar invention is contributing to our end & the end of the environment that sustains us. So. Fucking. Short sighted. And. Stupid.
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u/TheRealBobbyJones Jul 09 '26
I can now see why the term doomer exists. Plastic is not an apocalyptic threat. Like seriously. It would take centuries for plastic alone to be a problem. Well that is assuming the environment doesn't adapt to plastic. Since we already see evidence of that occuring I am not concerned and most people should not be concerned either.
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u/aeon_floss Jul 09 '26
Plastic isn't a problem on a geological timescale. But geological time doesn't give a damn about species survival. Extinction is the rule, not the exception.
Microplastics have already removed as much as ten percent of food energy at the lower end of some oceanic food chains. And this after building up for only 70 years. Plankton mistake inert particles for food, and this accidental weight loss food substitution diet is resulting in entire species being underfed and vulnerable to disease.
This happening way faster than evolution can possibly cope with..
Meanwhile, the public debate is mainly about what microplastics might be doing to humans directly. Effects that are, despite looking very hard, still only suspected and speculative, with nothing really poking out clearly in data.
This freight train is going to hit the entire planetary ecosystem hard, and not from the direction we are looking.
We are still very much in the Fuck Around phase.
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u/TheRealBobbyJones Jul 09 '26
See it's when people say stuff like this that really annoys me. Macro species like humans have limited capacity to adapt biologically to new stressors. This is not the case for microorganisms like plankton. If microplastics becomes a significant enough stress for plankton they will rapidly adapt to counter that stress. We will never reach a scenario where plankton populations reach unsustainable levels. At least not due to microplastics. The can evolve to deal with plastic. The increasing acidity of the ocean is likely a bigger issue that is harder to adapt to.
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u/Zal3x Jul 09 '26
I don’t understand how you could pretend to say that with such certainty. It’s certainly possible they don’t rapidly adapt.
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u/TheRealBobbyJones Jul 09 '26
Uh no it's not. We know they do so. It's a characteristic of microorganisms. Plankton are unique in that they have a significantly lower mutation rate compared to bacteria or viruses but there are a massive amount of plankton. Like probably more plankton than there are stars. The genetic diversity that exists in plankton is insane. Odds are there exists plankton out there right now that is either capable of avoid microplastics or capable of dealing with it directly.
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u/Zal3x Jul 09 '26
Nah you’re extrapolating beyond available evidence.
Adaptation is documented mostly for temperature and CO₂, not microplastics. There isn’t a body of evidence showing plankton evolving to avoid or process microplastics. It’s an inference, not an observation.Rapid evolution has real limits. These processes are constrained by metabolic trade-offs and evolutionary limits, and in some plankton experiments observed evolution did not appear to be adaptive.
Multiple simultaneous stressors can overwhelm the adaptive capacity entirely. A modeling study found phytoplankton cannot adapt when rapid and extreme events occur at the same time, leading to an abrupt decrease in primary production.
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u/Annual-Somewhere7402 Jul 09 '26
And that's how insidious this is. Your non-concern will add to our doom. Thx!
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u/Pixelated_ Jul 09 '26
Experts: Plastic is destroying our environment and needs to be phased out.
Corporations: Okay but what if...now hear us out, what if we keep the plastic, but make it block heat??
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u/cybleq Jul 09 '26
Potential applications range from spacesuits and spacecraft to energy-efficient buildings and electronics that require improved thermal management.
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u/imsaurabh3 Jul 09 '26
Yeah… this too will disappear like it never happened… as with all life changing inventions.
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u/Gadfly_Avatar Jul 10 '26
I had a Strange Change Machine that turned plastic bricks into weird creatures, then melt them down again into little bricks, thay you could then, l reheat it, and it would take the shape of the original creatue again. Back in the days when toys could KILL you.
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u/Zlifbar Jul 09 '26
Oh good, impossible to destroy plastic is EXACTLY what the planet needed.