SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

New Atlas:

A team of engineers at MIT led by C. Cem Tasan has discovered why steel razor blades go dull even when cutting hair that's 50 times softer than them. Using an electron microscopic, they found that under the right conditions a single hair can chip a blade edge.

[...] However, razor blades don't last and other steel blades, like knives and scalpels, also go dull even when used exclusively on softer materials. According to MIT, this is because there's more going on than a simple wearing down of metal, such as happens when a blade is rubbed against something harder, like a whetstone. Instead, what happens is that if a razor blade strikes a hair under the wrong conditions, it becomes stressed, cracks, and then chips due to a mechanism called stress intensification. This chipping leads to more cracks, leading to more chipping in a cascading cycle, ultimately resulting in a very dull razor and an unpleasant shave.

Journal Reference:
Gianluca Roscioli, Seyedeh Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, Cemal Cem Tasan. How hair deforms steel [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba9490)

Apparently it is not because the hairs have been affected by Brundlefly hybridization.

Original Submission