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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

With humble materials you can do some pretty amazing science.

I'm surprised that given the stingy budgets of many American labs that this isn't more typical.

It's difficult to imagine an article like this about the US. "MIT researchers study solar storms using cheap recycled materials." It doesn't sound right.

It's a bit illogical though. All of us owe our current prosperity and standard of living due to people in the past finding cheaper ways to do things.

I just doubt that it would be news if Caltech or MIT used recycled materials in an experiment.

We owe our current prosperity to companies aggressively cutting costs to make more profit.

Labs generally don't care about unit economics. They're more concerned with cutting edge proof of concept

Bro, I don't care what this article is trying to sell you. Science is never cheap. It is awesome that these scientist figure out some creative way to cut cost. If everyone is starting to do this on the large scale, the human civilization will stop developing.

> Science is never cheap.

History disagrees. Some of the most fundamental discoveries were made using little more than junk laying around the scientist's laboratory.

You don't need a billion dollar budget to do important work. If you think you do, human civilization will stop developing because it's too busy applying for grants.

> Science is never cheap

I mean we got penicillin from moldy bread. "Never" is a strong word.

EDIT: It was from a moldy petri dish. The basic point still stands.

Science is only expensive because it's tied to the perverse incentives of capitalism.

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