I remember NileRed spent ages trying to reproduce this. The material seems very difficult to make.

Wood is already stronger than glass. If you read the article, what they say make sense, but this title is silly.

Now we just need to make transparent aluminium.

Have they tested this lignin+resin against a control of just resin? Does the lignin reinforcement add much in the way of advantages?

At the end of the day it's more resin than wood, so I think "transparent wood" is misleading. It's wood-reinforced resin.

I mean I hope so, I can't normally shatter wood

Not seeing how windows would be a good use. We already have safety glass and materials to make glass is more plentiful. Display screens make sense if the material ends up as hard as glass but won’t shatter. That would be fantastic.

I'm guessing there's a big crux here for both windows and phones. Article says ten times tougher than glass and several times stronger....but wood is not HARD. Hardness is what resists scratching. Something that scratches easily will knock it out of a lot of useful scenarios. I'd imagine most things you'd want to be clear you wouldn't need the extra strength for, or would want it to not show scratches.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The materials scientist, who works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, specializes in polymer composites and was interested in creating a more robust alternative to transparent plastic.

“I truly believe this material has a promising future,” says Qiliang Fu, a wood nanotechnologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China who worked in Berglund’s lab as a graduate student.

To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues.

Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent.

The slim profile and strength of the material means it could be a great alternative to products made from thin, easily shattered cuts of plastic or glass, such as display screens.

But most research has centered on transparent wood as an architectural feature, with windows a particularly promising use, says Prodyut Dhar, a biochemical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi.

The original article contains 741 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Can’t see the wood from the trees.