Non-exotic methods of strengthening wood, made it to high levels of production in spades: plywood, oriented strand board, microlam and glulam beams, and medium density fiber board (MDF) are direct examples. Wood I-joists and plate connected wood trusses are less direct. From a functional standpoint, standardization of lumber grades is a social technology that allows designing wood members with known engineering properties.
On the chemical front, pressure treated lumber increases wood's strength across a timeline. Fire treatment increases wood strength in a narrow set of circumstances.
Of these, plywood is clearly the most successful in terms of industrial adoption being used for aircraft, boats, and furniture among other things.
Plywood - especially the higher grades - is amazing stuff. I visited a plywood factory in Ontario and it really opened my eyes to how clever and precise the manufacturing of various kinds of engineered wood is.
1: One carpenter I talked to complained that MDF won't hold screws, and apparently this is a common complaint, but if you drill properly sized pilot holes and use sheetmetal screws it's pull-out strength is fine, particularly since you need thicker MDF than ply, so you can use a longer screw.
And people tend to confuse plywood with OSB, MDO, MDF, etc.
And while marine plywood (BS-1088) is great stuff, and fir marine plywood is also pretty nice stuff, it's not magic. BS-1088 is will rot in a morning dew and fir checks horribly. You have to protect it carefully and keep it protected.
https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/materi...
Here's a street view link: https://goo.gl/maps/smQp7BpkgHF2
It's a bit of a random little stub street, so I'd never noticed it during my 4 years of undergrad, but it's a neat lil artifact.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2015/01/10/the-time-when-lo...
This seems to be a topic which animates a certain kind of urbanist nerd (of whom Ian Visits is the prince):
http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/wood/
http://www.endgrain.org.uk/history/
That last page is from some Welsh applied research project on using more endgrain wood for surfaces; there's lots more interesting material on that site.
http://www.philly.com/philly/living/20151225_Changing_Skylin...
The bit about the cutting boards being as hard as stone, is that pure hyperbole or is it possible?
I've broken more than one high quality steel bit on various kinds of wood, but that's usually not a measure of how hard the wood is but how much friction there is between the drill and the wood and how much of the drill bit is inside the wood. If the wood were really hard you would not be able to enter the bit at all and it would never break but just sit there spinning on the surface.
Finally, the whole trick to a cutting board is that end grain wood will wear very little and the knife will be sharp much longer specifically because it is not as hard as stone.
Here are some videos for the readers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTNVDH6ZFLg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isFTIHy7Duo
You will see pork bone chopping (beginning of the video), skin slicing (1:40), and meat grinding (5:30) in the second video.
Those are very typical boards in a restaurant's kitchen. The typical household chop board is a lot smaller and thinner, probably around 35" wide x 5" high. However, many families have moved away from wooden chopping board because plastic boards are easier to clean.
As far as resistance to bacteria, that will fall short with science. The passing down from generation to generation is a cultural effect. If you live with your in-laws, the board will of course be reused. Since wooden boards don't crack for years, yes, the board will be passed down. Butchers (Chinese and other cultures) use wooden boards because of the durability (Chinese chefs love chopping real fast with force). Real chefs prefer wooden chopping board (yeah, your famous Gordon Ramsay!)
Also, it is very common to see a butcher or a chef to stick the big kitchen knife on the side of the board tilted like the Leaning Tower of Pisa :-) The strength of a real butcher or a real chef can be so much more powerful than a MMA boxer.
EDIT: If you want a short English intro on this topic, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDdoht0e1sg is solid.
There's a foil edge on very sharp knives that will wrinkle and fold after use on anything, even tomatoes, making the knife feel dull. It's not, and it doesn't require removing metal as with grinding or sharpening, but you can steel to realign that edge or strop to hone it depending on the blade and angle. Even if you don't work with blades often, you've probably seen this depicted in media.
It really doesn't matter what the cutting surface is to the knife if you have great technique. Since I don't always, I use thin, flexible plastic barriers. I would never recommend wood outside of having no other choices or using it as part of presentation, mainly because of cross contamination and difficulty in sanitizing if you cook sous vide or serve raw often.
At Amazon in the new Day 1 building their main staircase to the lobby is built from wood ends and it is done very nicely. It looks great. There's probably pictures online of that.
edit, I found one picture from a geekwire article. Unfortunately you can't see the grain, the picture is from a far. https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/20161107...
That is done because wood is soft and if you drop a tool or part on the floor it's far less likely to be damaged. Wood has been superseded by (usually vinyl IIRC) tile and/or rubber/plastic mats in a lot of places.
http://kaswell.com/about-us/history-of-woodblock/
Looks like it's good for outside flooring. Actually doesn't look that bad when used for that either, kind of like bricks.
(Actual gallery here http://kaswell.com/gallery/)
More pics: https://www.google.de/search?q=stirnholzparkett&source=lnms&...
Closer up:https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0a/df/ba/b1/...
Each block is 6"x6" (15cm x 15cm) of pine. Apparently it lasts a long time, but took a long time to install.
It looks like the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) provides the detail you are looking for.
Do you have a good source for more info on axially compressed end grain flooring or cutting board construction techniques?
Plenty of floor links already in this thread.
You can drop a hammer head down on that stuff and it won't even leave a dent.
The article never says it's lighter, and the paper is behind a paywall. Interesting process none the less.
I don't really know much about the process or whether the chemical treatment can potentially make the wood heavier/absorb some of the liquid, which would offset the weight of the material that's lost.
My point wasn't that there's no way the result is lighter. My point was that the article didn't mention the weight before and after, so it seemed presumptuous to me to claim it was definitely lighter.
I went to check the actual paper to confirm, hit a paywall, and so was unable to verify. I was hoping someone would comment with more details.
The heavier such floors are used the stronger they get!
The wood in the article is compressed crosswise to the grain (so they get thinner rather than shorter), using the original planks as the raw organic material to produce an engineered product that has relatively little to do with the original wood. While this is very impressive the process does not sound cheap (it is time consuming and will produce quite a bit of toxic waste) and the way the article is worded leaves it ambiguous of the strength increase is relative to the original base material or if it is on an absolute scale using the same cross section.
The article states the result is 10 times stronger than the original after being compressed to 1/5th of the size, making it effectively thinner, lighter and stronger at the same time.
It appears that the increase in density is where the writer missed the fact that reducing the cross section but leaving the amount of material the same does not result in an increase in strength on an absolute scale, it merely means that if you then laminated five of the densified planks back to the original cross section the result would be 11 times stronger.
But then you'd lose much of the weight advantage.
So I suspect this is either a space or a strength gain, but not both to the extent the article indicates.
In the previous century there was a lot of research done on strengthening wood including gamma radiation and all kinds of other treatments, but none of those ever made it to very high levels of industrial adoption.