DARPA boffins develop unfeasibly light metal fluff-structure Boffins at California's HRL Laboratories have developed what they claim is the world's lightest material, a nickel structure that is a hundred times lighter than styrofoam. World's lightest material Credit: Dan Little for HRL Laboratories World's lightest material Credit: Dan Little for HRL Laboratories Working with …
It's obviously an open-cell foam, so it would fill with water and still sink. That doesn't make it any less cool though.
The best thing about that picture is that it shows that they can make the stuff in macroscopic pieces. Carbon nanotubes are great things, but when you can only make tiny tiny ones, it's not as exciting.
"It's obviously an open-cell foam, so it would fill with water and still sink. That doesn't make it any less cool though."
Maybe, maybe not. Water has a fairly high surface tension, and this is a VERY lightweight substance with rather small openings - I suspect that without additional energy to force the water to overcome the obstacle of surface tension, there would be insufficient migration into the cells to cause the structure to sink. Of course, should the water actually penetrate into the structure the same surface tension forces will then encourage further seepage.
Of course, I'll openly admit that I'm guessing here. :)
-d
I was thinking more along the lines of a cycle helmet that's slim, light and cool enough to wear while actually affording a reasonable level of protection (i.e. a lot more than the current standard "should help if you topple over at jogging speed and only hit a smooth flat surface").
@havin_it:
30 St Mary Axe, known as 'The Gherkin' in London, the triangulated perimeter structure of which makes this 40-storey building sway (wind) resistant without any extra reinforcements - and which despite its overall curved shape, doesn't make extensive use of curved glass except at the cap. Small wonder an international survey of major architectural practices in 2006 rated it the "world's most admired new building".
But let's face it, space frame construction - which is what the new material's form seems to be most reminiscent of - was arrived at as early as 1900 by Alexander Graham Bell, before being thought up again by Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s... plenty of examples of that around, try Stansted Airport for a well-known example.
The Eiffel Tower is a lattice made of smaller lattices. Brilliant. But m. Eiffel gave up too soon. If the 'lattice made from smaller lattices' concept was followed through in an almost endlessly-recursive manner, then Eiffel Tower would weigh next to nothing. Obviously the recursion has to stop when the technology runs out (nanometer scale these days). Done correctly, the structural strength is retained (if not improved) while the mass tends towards zero.
The DARPA example is wonderful and fantastic, but it would be infinitely lighter if the solid tubes were made of (10:) lattice structures (GOTO 10) - all the way down.
I wonder if a tire with a layer of this stuff interlace Piezoelectric material would be possible with this stuff.
Distribution of mechanical force through the linking around a tire.
A nice little side effect might be shock absorption as the energy interlace in the linking moves around the tire.
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