For all the experimentalists out there, here is a really neat material/product/company:
http://www.conceptgroupinc.com/howitworks.html "Even an extraordinarily thin Insulon shaped-vacuum layer is fully effective at stopping the conduction of thermal energy. We have already produced barriers with vacuum gaps as narrow as 0.1mm, and the theoretical limit of this technology is even narrower still." "The Insulon Shaped-Vacuum Thermal Barrier gives you the power of vacuum insulation for a whole new world of amazingly small applications. It traps a profoundly deep vacuum, a vacuum as deep as that being used in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in spaces as small as four-thousandths of an inch or smaller." They show an example where the inner surface is at -321F and the exterior of the cylinder is +72F, with a vacuum insulation barrier of only 0.1mm. Way cool! -Mark
