Show the [beep]ing picture!

Then, even worse, they RELY ENTIRELY ON UNLABELED AI GENERATED IMAGES.

I cannot imagine a better way to say "there's a high chance everything we've promised is fake news". Just make sure to squint before looking at our ad copy!

U. of Maryland announced this specific process back in 2018.[2] They got a paper into Nature.[3]

Densified wood is over a century old. [4] You can buy something called "Lignostone".[5] But that is a material where they took the lignin out and put some plastic in. (Remember "transparent wood" from a few years ago. Same concept, with a transparent plastic.) This new process takes the lignin out and compresses the cell structure.

If you could send in $20 and get a little cube of the stuff to look at and test, this would be more convincing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiHABi97rU8

[2] https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/new-densified-wood-...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

[4] https://jwoodscience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s1008...

[5] https://www.roechling.com/us/industrial/lignostone

https://youtu.be/96Dz-rQtGxI

Here's someone from the InventWood team talking about the product, uses, future, and more at a trade show.

They show a hands-on demo of the wood product and give an animation of the process.

The talk is pretty illuminating. They think this will even be used in the automotive sector in places where carbon fiber is currently utilized.

This is way better than the press coverage and actual website.

You lost hope because they used an industry standard term?

in a mechanical sense, a compressed object goes back to normal when the stress is removed, unless you break it. if the work piece did not go back to its original shape, you arent just conpressing anymore. eg. you are likely "cold working" it instead.

if youre applying heat, you might be "forging" or "casting" while applying that compressive force.

theyre all quite distinct

Unfortunately every profession with any depth of knowledge will have jargon. Even house staff at a restaurant will talk about 2-tops and 4-tops, etc. It's just jargon, or better yet, convenient abstraction to describe the problem space these people live and breath.

Say what you will about the website but the video is a pretty reasonable sales demo.

Projects just make it a lot further that way. The consumer wants to believe. The doer has to believe. The invester will take a hit on the cheek for the moon.

Plus, all the text on the page is future tense, talking about what the super wood beams will be able to do.

So I don't know how much that picture really represents what the wood will look like.

The picture at https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-facade also looks AI-generated.

The fact that they're using AI images on their landing pages does not give me confidence in the quality of the product.

(ex: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67160715a896dc...)

Edit: Even the photos of wood on a truck is obviously AI garbage when you zoom in: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67160715a896dc...

What about this: https://www.newhometrendsinstitute.com/consumer-insights/ind...

the image is low resolution, but appears to be from an actual trade show, and an image not from the company.

https://www.inventwood.com/technology

But I’m not sure if it a real photo or some sort of… analogy? Under “INTRODUCING SUPERWOOD: THE NEXT GENERATION OF BUILDING MATERIALS,” we can see one piece that looks like an actual piece of wood, and then some other ones that looks like an artificial wood-looking finish wrapped around some core which visually looks metallic (but which, I assume, is actually their engineered wood).

I dunno. I guess “being wood” is more about the ecological impact in this case. If it is replacing steel and it looks ugly, well, a lot of steel looks ugly and then gets covered up.

They didn't even bother to AI-upscale it to get rid of the artifacts

fwiw, I first thought this was going to be some innovation in glue, which allows manufacturers to turn wood chips and sawdust into MDF, OSB, and particle board. These are typically weaker than sawyered beams of the same size because the glue is not as strong as the cellulose fibers that run the length of a beam. (However, they are getting applied more and more in the construction in the US because it is crazy expensive to find a tree that can produce thick enough 40 ft beams, but you can easily get enough sawdust to make an even thicker, precut MDF board.) But I thought no shot, because if you can make glue that is stronger than cellulose, then why bother with the wood?

https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00...

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/SUPERWOOD-...

And there are only smaller comparisons towards steel. They are more focused on how it compares to regular wood.

In summary, what they are doing: 1. Boil the wood. 2. Press the wood. 3. Done.

"First, natural wood blocks were immersed in a boiling aqueous solution of mixed 2.5 M NaOH and 0.4 M Na2SO3 for 7 h, followed by immersion in boiling deionized water several times to remove the chemicals. Next, the wood blocks were pressed at 100 °C under a pressure of about 5 MPa for about 1 day to obtain the densified wood"

Pretty simple and straightforward.

https://brenthull.com/article/old-growth-wood

I have high hopes for this product as a leg of sustainability.

Here's a NileRed video replicating the process.

In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?

https://www.inchcalculator.com/actual-size-of-dimensional-lu...

That's just an old wives tale.

Lumber shrinks for money reasons, older lumber is bigger [1] with sequential revisions to the standard decreasing it's real size [2] [3] (the difference between 2in and 15/8in in strength is minimal however you can keep doing that math, and they did, to go down from 2in to 1.5in over a century).

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/vv9atu/t...

[2]: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDeta...

[3]: https://www.synthmind.com/miscpub_6409.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaJFudED5FQ

They claim that the change was driven by railroad shipping charges, and wasn't based on drying, but on pre-planing the rough lumber to reduce shipping cost. They further claim that in 1919 the US Dept. of Agriculture studied the issue and ended up defining a national standard for what the post-planed dimensions of a 2x4 should be. And they further claim that it took until the early 1960s to settle on a new standard that matches what we use today.

The pre-planing is a common claim, but I don't believe it. They can make lumber whatever size they want - of course they need to plane it, but they just make it larger to account for that. Still the planing excuse it one they like to use because it doesn't show "them" as trying to cheat us.

I understand the origins of this. But I've never understood why we haven't moved on to actual sizing given the scale at which standardized lumber dimensions are produced

I'm not sure if it's been measured, but I imagine this densified wood would probably have at least twice the thermal conductivity of typical construction lumber, since naturally dense hardwoods already approach that.

So it seems like we'd basically need to replace 2x studs with 1x studs, assuming the same stud spacing, in order to match the thermal performance of a traditional wall.

I don't think this would be a dealbreaker at all though, one could always use continuous insulation instead of cavity insulation, which has a lot of benefits anyway. Maybe it can end up being a competitor to metal studs for commercial builds, at least.

I believe that's somewhat true of woods as well - different woods seem to range from 0.12-0.25 W/(mK) or so, which is somewhat less conductive than the underlying compounds like cellulose (0.4), thanks to the trapped air in wood.

It seems like densifying wood would mitigate the insulation contribution of trapped air, causing thermal conductivity to approache that of the underlying compounds like cellulose, though I'm not sure exactly what those compounds are with their process and how close they get to that air-free extreme.

its very unlikely that this change will be an important consideration for house building or shopping though. theres simpler spots to reduce heat loss, like double paning your windows

The loss of r value can be off set with two 2x4 frames. As strong as a 2x6 wall and about the same price. Added benefit is air gaps.

I wonder how it impacts the effects of humidity and time to make wood warp.

This process will need to regenerate almost all of that sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, or it's just peracetic paper again.

You're right insofar as lots of improvements have been made to steel-and-concrete building fire safety since the 1970s. Plastics are sometimes still a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

https://nfsa.org/2023/08/22/understanding-combustible-materi...

Until we mix metals and have galvanic corrosion, where an Al + Ti system corrodes exactly where the metals touch.

It's not titanium that will corrode when you have an aluminium frame bike with a Ti bolt at the bottom bracket.

Scale of the artifact is also a variable if size is a constraint.

Similarly trying to compare "titanium" to "steel" is dumb. No one uses pure titanium for structural purposes & there are hundreds of common steel alloys.

Please stop repeating this FUD. The notion that a rigid steel frame provides measurable shock absorbtion over the supple, air-filled, rubber tires is mind numbingly stupid.

What exact differences in physical properties or construction leads to this, I couldn’t tell you, but you can pick up an old steel bike frame for cheap and experience it yourself. Well-made steel frames are much lighter than poorly-made ones, so I would recommend finding one of the good ones.

You could build your floor joists out of scaffolding boards, but they'd bend unacceptably.

Stiffness is basically a product of geometry rather than strength. Making your wood stronger doesn't help you if you need it to be stiffer.

There's another advantage of putting wood through a heating-and-cooling cycle: you remove internal stresses that cause it to twist.

You've been extremely informative and helpful, thank you.

I ended up putting beams in to half the span across my own house because it got so annoying(I want to say they are high grade SYP 2x10s @ 13 or 14')

The strength is 483–587 MPa, I seem to see when skimming, which is indeed superior to ASTM A36 structural steel (250MPa yield strength). In Extended Data Figure 1c, they reported the density as 1.3g/cc, a sixth of the density of steel. (Extended data figure 2f plots density against lignin removal percentage.) Of course high-strength steels are stronger, but not six times stronger.

As for the process, they didn't just boil the wood; they boiled it with lye (2.5M, the "food industry chemical") and sodium sulfite (0.4M, technically also a food industry chemical, used for example as an antioxidant in wine) for 7 hours before densifying it with 5MPa for "about a day", removing optimally 45% of the lignin. This is similar to the sulfite chemical wood pulping process that preceded the Kraft paper process, just carried out at high pH and not taken to completion, so in a sense I guess the result is sort of like Masonite, which is also made from cellulose fibers from wood bonded with the wood's natural lignin.

Environmental concerns may be an obstacle; sulfite pulping is nasty. Also presumably to mass-produce the stuff they'll want to find ways to shorten the cycle time, and maybe already have.

The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago. Sulfite pulping was going gangbusters, building materials were booming, environmental concerns were largely unknown, and there was a rage for everything newfangled, modern, and "scientific". The scientific discipline of strength of materials, needed to calculate the benefits, was already well developed. Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929, with a process involving autoclaving wood chips at 2800kPa. So what prevented someone from selling Superwood back then? Did nobody try partial alkaline sulfite pulping and pressing the result?

  > The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago

  > Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929

People have been doing that since at least 01998.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128020723/http://longnow.or...

> established in 1996 ... The Long Now Foundation hopes to "creatively foster responsibility" in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[2] (e.g., by writing the current year "02025" rather than "2025"). The organization's logo is X, a capital X with an overline, a representation of 10,000 in Roman numerals.

---

They zero pad, but it doesn't seem like anyone else does so with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

error: invalid digit "8" in octal constant error: invalid digit "9" in octal constant

But why only one leading zero? You can show you care somewhat more about the future by writing 002025, but then someone comes along and writes 000002025 ...

My daughter recently started researching extracting/converting CNCs from fabric blends (currently cotton/elastane like spandex). Reading this post made me wonder if we can then remake fabric from CNCs, strong against knives or bullets?

This all sounds very interesting if you have any links!

Many of the slides aren't available yet, but I'll try to curate some from photos. I'll put photo number from Dropbox, since they make direct-linking hard.

Photo 62 to 67 shows the H2O2 work from Mark Andrews' lab at McGill, being commercialized by a company called Anomera.

Photo 8 and 9 has a Cyrene whitepaper from Merck/Sigma-Aldrich. They did have presentations about it, but I don't have notes, will try to get from my daughter as she wants to try it for her process.

Photo 16 has a revisualized Periodic table of elements, logarithmically scaled by availability and color-coded with scarcity / conflict / need. We only have 100 years of Indium left and that was sorta worthless >20 years ago and now used in every touchscreen. had photo but put source link instead [4]

Photo 2 shows that we are now man-making stuff at a greater rate than the earth is creating stuff and that is rapidly increasing. The point there was that we will keep doing this, so we need to make it sustainable and circular. Photo 5 shows how FUBAR'd we are.

Happy to try to answer other questions, but noting I'm not a chemist but a chaperone, so I'll have to ask other people.

[1] https://www.isgc-symposium.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974375

[3] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/5u8xmvcxv5x1zyzaq0jxu/APJPtEo...

[4] https://www.euchems.eu/euchems-periodic-table/

Maybe because at that time tropical hardwood was readily available at low cost?

I suspect that the problem us, as usual, in the price. Also possibly with the high anisotropy of the material

blushes

So I don't know if the concept is explained in more details elsewhere, but I think it's clearly an integral part of their communication.

to be clear, having read through their website, I think what they're doing is great, and this isn't a criticism

That's the kind of programming that makes you reluctant to put anything into it.

Not using leading zeros seems fine if you're using AD near it to indicate that it's not 1942.

curious: What's with the funky date notation? Is this the new cool thing?

https://longnow.org/about/

Call me skeptical, but reformatting dates for a "bug" in 8000 years seems extraordinarily silly. To think humanity will likely be using the same time measurement systems, computers that operate remotely similarly to ours today, same written/spoken languages, etc is laughable. 8000 years ago, the entire world's human population was roughly equal to that of London today and still just figuring out agriculture.

You know, back in 01999 we were sticking representation of dates into these bit sized 'registers'. Certainly hope by the time we hit 10000 CE "long term thinking" has made significant inroards in the field of information processing ..

We still write year 476 as 476. We don't have to write 0476 to prevent confusing it with 1476. It's not confusing.

The posted Techcrunch article directly links to the Nature paper, it is the very first link of the article

So it's entirely possible that the process was found, and discarded straight away because they didn't realize how cool their invention was.

As for the reason it wasn't my wild guess would be that they were already mining for coal so it may have been more economical to just dig the ground with quasi-slaves rather than having more competition on the wood resource and waiting for it to boil whereas you can just produce steel bar by the kilometer in a factory.

I think that your critique of Gilded Age exploitative labor practices is not to the point.

Yes, lignin puffs up the wood, when some of it is removed by boiling and then heated up and pressed at the same time, carbon molecules bond with each other exponentially more.

I was researching this subject two - three years back. Anything that needs to be able to move at some point, benefits a lot by being 6 times lighter. Also buildings are always constrained by their weight when trying to make them as tall as possible.

I'd argue that it is to the point insofar as the price of labor is important to the competitiveness of a finished product, isn't it so ?

I think your response stems from the fear of me trying to turn this into something "political" but it seems to me that going down the mine has been really hard work and low pay for most of History. I am pretty sure that most historians would agree that mining is one of the easiest use of slave labor (go down the mine and bring back the stuff failing which you will be punished, also no skills required) from the point of view of slave owner/manager that is. I am also sure they would agree that after the abolition of slavery, you could consider a big chunk of mine workers, quasi slaves. Hell, even today, mining is one of the main use for drug-addicted labor force in Myanmar and child labor in Congo.

By 2025 standards, the 1890s were a time of extreme poverty, low technology, and medical ignorance. Life was short and hard, but also much better than a century earlier.

In a century, people will hopefully say the same about our time.

To quote an economist (Branko Milanovic) who's done work on this topic in the context of 19th century Serbia attempting to industrialize their peasant population:

> All contemporary evidence points to the fact that peasants were not at all keen to move to cities and work for a wage. Since there was no landlessness very few people were pushed by poverty to look for city jobs. Political parties which strongly (and understandably) represented peasantry further limited mobility of labor by guaranteeing homestead (3.5 ha of land, house, cattle, and the implements) which could not be alienated, neither in the case of default on a loan nor in the case of overdue taxes.

> This situation was very typical for the late industrializers in South-East Europe. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia were all overwhelmingly agricultural with small peasant landholdings and no landlessness. All displayed slow or arrested capitalist development and half-hearted urbanization. The reason was simple: farmers had no incentive to move from being self-employed to being hired labor. And who would prefer to switch from being one’s own boss and dependent perhaps only on the elements to become a hired hand, working six days a week all year round, in “satanic mills”?

> ...

> The question is, how do you industrialize under such conditions? Reluctance of peasants, whenever they had their own land, to become industrial workers has been discussed (Gerschenkron, Polanyi). In England they had to be literally chased from land through enclosures; in France, the process was much more overdrawn and took a century; in Germany, Poland and Hungary, large estates owned by nobility and consequent landlessness did the job. In Russia, it was bloody and occurred through forced collectivization.

> ...

> The process whereby agricultural economies industrialized was wrenching. The displacement and unhappiness of the population dragged into industrial centers through either empty stomachs or outright terror was incomparable in its human costs to today’s similar transfer of labor from manufacturing to services (or to unemployment). The transformation in the underlying economic structure is never easy but it seems to me that the one from the fresh air and freedom of own farm to being a cog in a huge soiled machine of industrialization was the most painful.

Fewer people can produce as much food as before, so the people not needed for food production can start producing other things.

This can of course be a tragedy for the people left without work, but for society at a macro level it is hugely beneficial.

This era in England has a bad reputation, and by our standards it was awful, but by objective measures like average lifespan, population size and technological progress, it was a time of unprecedented progress and material improvement for common people.

Did people lose a sense of community as they left their ancestral villages. Probably, and I don't know how to weigh that against our immense wealth today.

A similar phenomenon occurs sometimes in papers about ceramics research. A very tough ceramic will often see a comparison of its fracture toughness to that of aluminium; as you've guessed, this usually refers to the toughness of pure unalloyed aluminium.

The sawdust planks wouldn't have the properties of the long-grain wood fiber planks though. The fibers that make up natural wood are what makes the wood tough.

You are evidently thinking of chipboard, not plywood.

Chipboard (also known as Particle Board), is a wood composite material of wood chips and sawdust, compacted and bound together with adhesives.

Plywood is made of multiple cross-layered wood veneers, pressed with adhesives.

A bit more detail at [0].

[0] https://www.thewoodworkplace.com/plywood-vs-chipboard/

Thank you - yes, I mixed them up in my head!

Plywood can be nice. It doesn't expand with temperature changes like planks and doesn't have a grain direction that it can split along.

The others, I hate. Any small amount of moisture and they delaminate. OSB is so ugly and rough that you need to hide it because you'll never be able to apply enough primer to cover the chip pattern. I'd rather just use regular plywood at that point. Particle board is the same, but I'm okay with the kind coated on both sides with melamine. It's pretty hard to get a much flatter surface than melamine particle board without spending ridiculously more on granite.

But MDF is the worst. A lot of people like MDF because it's easy to work and can be fairly structural, if you use it right. But it's very, very easy to damage, has absolutely zero edge strength, and it makes a super-fine, extremely carcinogenic sawdust that is extremely difficult to clean up completely. Yes, all sawdust is carcinogenic, always wear a mask in the wood shop, but MDF sawdust never goes away.

Frankly, it's just easier to get a bunch of sheets of birch plywood and southern pine dimensional lumber shipped direct to my house and not worry about it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but almost all use cases for wood rely on it to be somewhat light, for which the lattice structure is already fairly ideal.

Laminated timber is also very construction-friendly. It can be worked with simple tools, and CNC machines allow for prefab components to be shipped to the site and assembled quickly with minimal fuss.

There are some plans for high rise construction with this material. E.g. there is a plan for a skyscraper in Tokyo (350 meters, 70 floors).

The adhesives used in laminated timber aren’t perfect. They’re very durable, which is great for structural integrity. But it also means the material breaks down more slowly in a landfill (if you decide not to recycle the material for some reason). However, newer adhesives used for this these days are less toxic and not that harmful in a landfill. And importantly, most of the material is actually just wood, not glue.

Is it possible to make smaller scale CLT, with thinner boards or something, and build like cars or airplanes out of it?

That said, CLT has 2 major advantages over regular wood:

1. It is more dimensionally stable, it expands/contracts less and in a more uniform way.

2. It is cheaper at larger dimensions. I.e. 0.5m x 0.5m x 20m wooden beams would take decades to grow and even then not realiably, but you can just manufacture CLT beams with those dimensions easily out of <10yr old trees.

Those two advantages are not limiting factors for the construction of cars or airplanes, so CLT is not super relevant to them.

Aluminum still has a higher strength/weight ratio which is everything in aero. Also, I'm not finding any information on cyclic strain behavior. Dimensional stability is only part of that.

Edit: There could be room for this in experimental aircraft. Once we tease out all the failure modes and properly characterize cyclic behaviorof course.

A lot of modern cars are made with a lot of composite materials that probably have better properties. But I imagine CLT could work well for things that are currently made out of steel or aluminium on such cars. I'm not sure if there's a big advantage to doing that in terms of strength, weight, or durability though. Aluminium might be lighter. And composite materials provide better strength and weight.

I don't know what the implications are for recyclability, but there's no mention of injecting other materials so perhaps it decomposes in a similar way to ordinary wood?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

I'm no expert on this subject by any means, but I happen to volunteer at a museum where we have steam trains running. We build our tracks to look traditional, so we use wooden sleepers and no ballast. Most of our sleepers are donated from the commercial railroad companies, typically they are old stock but we also receive used ones occasionally. In my part of the world wooden sleepers aren't common anymore, so it's getting harder to find usable ones. This is a concern for us, as apaearantly there aren't any suppliers left in our part of the world for new ones. At our museum they typically last for about 15 years, mainly because we place our sleepers directly on the soil (no balast). The tar/oils will eventually dry out and the wood will just rot/decompose naturally. Wooden sleepers are considered chemical waste in my part of the world, though I do believe we are allowed to let them decompose fully as biomatter, which goes quite quick if in contact with moist soil. Though we typically dispose our used sleepers at a specialized waste facility, I'm not sure how they process it there.

Oh, and in case you are wondering: no, they don't burn, so we can't use them as firewoord for our steam engines ;-)

Appearantly in the USA, at least as of 2008, around 90% of all track was still using wood [1]. I didn't expect that. For most of the world we have used concrete sleepers for a long time already. Plastic sleepers are also common nowadays, which are typically made from recycled materials.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creosote [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_tie

This is for a few reasons, but the two primary ones are that wood is very cheap and plentiful in the US compared to most of the rest of the world, and we haven't banned creosote in the US like most of the rest of the world, so creosote treated wood is still the most common type of railroad tie.

Like everything else there's probably some 2nd/3rd order consequence of regulatory perversion that prevents it. Like because of the circumstances it wrongly gets classified as hazmat or something.

Same with telephone poles.