First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
I find Salter & Crew’s result quite surprising. Received wisdom has it that bloomery iron is nearly pure and a lot of effort is needed to add carbon. Here they seem to have achieved high quality carbon steel in a simple one-step direct process. This reminds of the liquid phosphorus eutectic also reported by Schmidt & Childs 1995 (list of 2013-03-25) but Salter & Crew unexpectedly don’t mention the very problematic forging properties.
Hsiang continues to confuse long-term continuous changes or such from one equilibrium to another with short-term temperature excursions serving as triggers. As such his new results are just as correct and just as meaningless as the previous ones were.