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Comment by briandon | Hacker News Reader

Neither of the two videos embedded in the linked press release shows any damage to the blade of the razor. They each cut out at the point that the blade has just finished slicing through a hair, while the hair is still in contact with the blade edge and obscuring our view of any hypothetical chips or defects caused by the cutting process. Bizarre.

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The first SEM video shows a small-omega shaped scallop in the blade after it cut the hair. It is indeed a shame this is only visible in the final handful of frames before the video loops.

For me though it didn’t detract too much from the awe. What an incredible result.

What I see there is the cut edge of the hair overlapping the blade rather than any change in the blade itself.

The videos are very cool and I appreciate cool videos, but I don't see any evidence in them for the claim of capturing damage to the blades. It's possible that the press release omits clearer videos that unequivocally show damage to the blades during cutting.

Or it's also possible some grad students with a null hypothesis result are hyping their own startup idea - they have a patent on making better steel for such high toughness applications. Surely that's a technology that would have wide impact on a large number of industries, they probably chose razors as a low mass, high value MVP and hope to scale up.

> The researchers have filed a provisional patent on a process to manipulate steel into a more homogenous form, in order to make longer-lasting, more chip-resistant blades.

How is that specific to razor blades? Surely this scenario of sharp bendy steel blade meets soft material is common across many industries.

I mean that's the zebra, yes. The horse is they just cut the video a bit too early and didn't watch it after doing so.

There are videos in the supplemental to the paper, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba9490 I love figure S5, it belongs in the surprisingly large family of "physics experiments involving the researcher's own hair" ("cross hairs" on a telescope were originally made from hair or spider silk).

I don't know why you mentioned s5...

s3 is good though. It actually shows some chips.

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