Move over spherical cow, circular cat is my new best friend

I told myself I wouldn’t read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.

But that’s not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don’t know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I’d just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg

Always a little annoyed at articles like this; “strength” doesn’t tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I’ll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg

IIRC, there is a bit more complexity than that to the Pirahã understanding of numeracy. Relative quantity is something they’re just fine at understanding, (with words for single/less, plural/more and same) it’s abstraction of quantities to tokenized values where they struggle. Which, I suppose, also interestingly lines up with the study results; the initial training period resulted in nodes associated with quantity, but those nodes were separate/unrelated to numeracy systems that developed with additional training.