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- Hacker News
- 'natural experiment' doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I don't know enough about chemistry to tell if this alloy has potentially interesting properties, or it's just interesting because it's something we weren't previously aware of as being possible.by anigbrowl
- It is a previously not-made mix of metals. But nothing in the paper explains why it is interesting. Sure we have not seen alloys with that exact combination, but nor have we seen that one with 2% more Si and 3% less Mo. It lacks a "why do we care?" section. Nor are documented any interesting properties of the same other than existing. What did i miss?by dmitrygr
- Somehow it reminds me of FMA's take on Philosopher's Stone https://fma.fandom.com/wiki/Philosopher%27s_Stoneby voidnothings
- Interesting. Bring on the A-bomb foundries! Had this been discovered during the exploration phase of atomic bomb use we probably would have seen A-bomb foundry proposals.
There is a hypothesized process in this paper that sounds like a graduate thesis on its own.
by tastyfreeze - This is really worth a read. Although the origin is an airblast, ground structures and soil is evaporated too into an inhomogeneous plasma. The relative fast cooling adds to the crystal formation.by MeteorMarc
- > hiroshimaite
Today I learned an interesting new word, which is led me to its analogues:
by EdwardDiego - Related: "Strange crystals found inside wreckage from the first nuclear bomb test" may 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155450 87 comments
- The "AlAu4" structure comment got me reading about the aluminum-gold phase diagram. One component there, AlAu2, was infamous in the early IC industry for causing chip failures ("purple plague").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold%E2%80%93aluminium_interme...
by pfdietz