A Wooden Knife Sharper Than Steel?

and wooden nails that do not bend or rust,

it seems improbable, but true, photographs University of Maryland, a team of researchers has developed a wood processing technique that makes the material 23 times harder, making it possible to create sharp wooden knives and nails,

the team created a knife that is allegedly nearly three times sharper than a stainless-steel dinner table knife, as well as a wooden nail that can be hammered through wood without sustaining any damage,

“When you look around at the hard materials you use in your daily life, you see many of them are man-made materials because natural materials won’t necessarily satisfy what we need,” study author Teng Li, a material scientist at the University of Maryland, said. “Cellulose, the main component of wood, has a higher ratio of strength to density than most engineered materials, like ceramics, metals, and polymers, but our existing usage of wood barely touches its full potential.”

“The knife cuts through a medium-well done steak easily, with similar performance to a dinner table knife,” Li said, adding that the hardened wood is about 23 times tougher than the regular wood it is made of, “An HW (hardwood) nail can be as functional as a steel nail with comparable performance but is immune from rusting, a key failure mechanism of steel nails,” the study authors wrote. “These encouraging applications suggest the promise of HW as a renewable and low-cost alternative for conventional hard materials with the potential to replace plastic table utensils and steel nails.” this may seem new, but Teng Li and his colleagues at the University of Maryland have been working on creating tough wood for years, and this their latest version of hardened wood and is their toughest one yet, wood as hard as nails, amazing!