Just a note of congratulations to the group of Julia Greer at Caltech
and Alan Jacobsen, Tobias Schaedler, at HRL Laboratories, et. al.
Aerogel used to be the world's lightest solid and found application
from our perspective in the tennis racket Stardust used to trap
particles from a comet.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Stardust_Dust_Collector_with_aerogel.jpg
Well, vacuum prepared aerogel has a density of about 1.0 milligrams/mL.
Enter: metallic micro-lattice. Density = 0.85 mg/mL.
"a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100
nanometers, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair."
It's actually nickel based and is a metal! On a microscopic level it
is like a skyscraper's steel skeleton (lattice), and it has a memory to
spring back to its structure when compressed up to 50 of it's thickness:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2011/11/16/334.6058.962.DC1/1211649s3.wmv
And it looks like a transparent metal!
Unlike aerogel, this one is probably not a dessicant.
Who will be the first listmember to get some of this hot material?
read more here:
http://features.caltech.edu/features/272
Kindest wishes
Doug
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