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posted by martyb on Saturday August 08 2020, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 08 2020, @02:12PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 08 2020, @02:12PM (#1033446) Journal

    Well, actually it's because in a fight a beard is a good thing to grab. Different groups had different attitudes towards that, though. And there's a bit a a consideration about cold weather, too. IIUC the huns, or perhaps it was the tartars, used to sear their faces with a hot iron to keep a beard from growing...but they did wear a long queue on the top of their head, so it wasn't exactly a reasonable choice. Alexander of Macedonia was one of the early military leaders requiring the troops to shave.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @06:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @06:52PM (#1033561)
    Beards are useful if you're fighting animals who might bite your throat from the front. It's not a great defense but it's a lot better than nothing if you're one of the ancestral hominids without much tech.

    But beards are bad when fighting against humans...

    That said, _detachable_ fake beards might help you win in a fight or avoid getting literally dragged into a fight. ;)