Aerographite, The Lightest Material Ever Created

Video: Aerographite, Tthe Lightest Material Ever Created -- Popular Science

We've been impressed in the past by aerogel, a lattice-like solid that's almost entirely made of air but can support weight and also has tremendous insulating properties. Then last year an ultralight metal caught our eye, weighing in at 99.99 percent air, which leaves 0.01 percent solid.

Now we are excited to meet aerographite, a sponge grown of carbon nanotubes that's the least dense solid ever: a cubic centimeter of it weighs just two ten-thousandths of a gram.

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The Carbon Age: Dark Element, Brighter Future

Image: A computer-rendered view inside a carbon nanotube. (Credit: ghutchis/Flickr)

From CNET:

Humankind has seen the Stone Age, the Golden Age, and the Iron Age. Some would argue the 20th century should be called the Silicon Age. Based on the events of its first 10 years, the 21st century may very well become known as the Carbon Age.

An important tension is unfolding between two types of carbon--atmospheric carbon in the form of carbon dioxide emissions, and elemental carbon as a building block for a new generation of devices designed to manage and abate those same pollutants.

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Quantum Physics Breakthrough: Scientists Find an Equation for Materials Innovation

Professor Emily Carter and graduate student Chen Huang developed a new way of predicting important properties of substances. The advance could speed the development of new materials and technologies. (Credit: Frank Wojciechowski)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 26, 2010) — Princeton engineers have made a breakthrough in an 80-year-old quandary in quantum physics, paving the way for the development of new materials that could make electronic devices smaller and cars more energy efficient.

By reworking a theory first proposed by physicists in the 1920s, the researchers discovered a new way to predict important characteristics of a new material before it's been created. The new formula allows computers to model the properties of a material up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible and vastly expands the range of properties scientists can study.

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Mimicking The Building Prowess Of Nature

From Technology Review:

Scientists build new materials using inspiration from complex biological forms.

Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientist at Harvard University, has scoured the natural world for clues to biological building codes. She aims to decipher some of Mother Nature’s unique designs, including dirt-resistant sea urchins and sea sponges made of super-strong light-conducting glass, to develop novel materials that, like these organisms, can self-assemble and sense and respond to their environment.

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Solving The Crystal Maze: The Secrets Of Structure

What makes graphite like this? (Image: Walden)

From New Scientist:

CRYSTALS are objects of true and profound mystery. That's not because they channel occult energies, or hold misty hints of the future in their limpid depths. Their puzzle is much less esoteric: why are they as they are?

It is an incredibly basic question, yet physicists still struggle with it. Can we say why a given group of atoms prefers one particular arrangement over another? Can we predict how a crystal will be structured, and so deduce what properties it will have?

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Diamonds Are For Softies – Boron Is Harder

Diamonds are famously the hardest natural substance, but they may be about to lose their crown (Image: Salexmccoy, Wikimedia Commons)

From New Scientist:

You don't often break a diamond. So when in 2003 Dave Mao cracked a tooth of his diamond anvil, he knew something extraordinary must have happened. Together with his daughter Wendy and other colleagues at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, he was using the device to test materials at pressures many millions of times higher than those at the Earth's surface - higher even than in our planet's core - by squeezing them between two tiny diamond jaws.

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A Metal Coating That Repairs Itself

Healing bubbles: Tiny fluid-filled capsules a few hundred nanometers wide are dispersed throughout a thin electroplated metal layer. The capsules could be filled with polymers to make metal coatings that repair themselves. Credit: Fraunhofer IPA

From Technology Review:

Electroplated metal could be used to make self-healing construction materials, car parts, and machinery.

Airplanes, cars, and ships that don't corrode are the promise of self-healing paint coatings and polymer materials. Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany have come up with a metal coating that may be able to repair itself after sustaining damage.

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Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’

Experimental set-up at the FLASH laser used to discover the new state of matter. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) — Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

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Silicon With Afterburners: New Process Could Be Boon To Electronics Manufacturer

Image: Scientists at Rice University and North Carolina State University have found a method of attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers reach beyond the current limits of Moore's Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rice University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — Scientists at Rice University and North Carolina State University have found a method of attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers reach beyond the current limits of Moore's Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful.

Moore's Law, suggested by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, said the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. But even Moore has said the law cannot be sustained indefinitely.

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New Material Could Cool Electronics 100 Times More Efficiently

Thermal Ground Plane Conductive Material Georgia Tech

From Popsci.com:

Georgia Tech researchers are working on a new novel material for cooling high-powered military radar gear up to 100 times better than current conductive heat-dissipation technology.

Developed in conjunction with Raytheon and DARPA, the material is a composite of copper and diamond, two of the most effective heat-conducting materials. The composite would serve as part of a sandwich of cooling materials called a Thermal Ground Plane, which, combined with a liquid cooling setup, would surround the transmit/receive module in a radar system.

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New Wonder Material, One-Atom Thick, Has Scientists Abuzz

Graphene has been described as a carbon nanotube unrolled. Its two-dimensional sheet is made up of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern like a honeycomb. Electrons can move ballistically through these sheets even at room temperature, making graphene a prime target of the electronics industry. image from Science@Berkeley Lab

From McClatchy News/Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON — Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.

That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It's creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.

"It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.

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Magnetic 'Superatoms' Promise Tuneable Materials

Designer clusters of atoms that can mimic other elements have for the first time been devised with magnetic properties (Image: Ulises Reveles, VCU)

From The New Scientist:

New "superatoms" – clusters of atoms that share electrons and can mimic the behaviour of other elements – have been devised with magnetic properties for the first time. The breakthrough provides a way to design novel nano-scale building blocks with controllable magnetic properties that could be used to make faster computer processors and denser memory storage.

Superatoms were discovered in the 1980s when Walter Knight and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that groups of sodium atoms can share electrons amongst themselves.

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Magnetic Super-atoms Discovered

VCs8 and MnAu24(SH)18 magnetic superatoms that mimic a manganese atom. The MnAu24 cluster is surrounded by sulfur and hydrogen atoms to protect it against outside attack, thus making it valuable for use in biomedical applications. (Credit: Image courtesy of Ulises Reveles, Ph.D, VCU.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2009) — A team of Virginia Commonwealth University scientists has discovered a ‘magnetic superatom’ – a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table – that one day may be used to create molecular electronic devices for the next generation of faster computers with larger memory storage.

The newly discovered cluster, consisting of one vanadium and eight cesium atoms, acts like a tiny magnet that can mimic a single manganese atom in magnetic strength while preferentially allowing electrons of specific spin orientation to flow through the surrounding shell of cesium atoms. The findings appear online in the journal Nature Chemistry.

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New Exotic Material Could Revolutionize Electronics

Surface electron band structure of bismuth telluride.
(Credit: Image courtesy of Yulin Chen and Z. X. Shen)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2009) — Move over, silicon—it may be time to give the Valley a new name. Physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips.

Recently-predicted and much-sought, the material allows electrons on its surface to travel with no loss of energy at room temperatures and can be fabricated using existing semiconductor technologies. Such material could provide a leap in microchip speeds, and even become the bedrock of an entirely new kind of computing industry based on spintronics, the next evolution of electronics.

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Inexpensive Plastic Used In CDs Could Improve Aircraft, Computer Electronics

CDs. The inexpensive plastic now used to manufacture CDs and DVDs may one day soon be put to use in improving the integrity of electronics in aircraft, computers and iPhones. (Credit: iStockphoto/José Luis Gutiérrez)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2009) — If one University of Houston professor has his way, the inexpensive plastic now used to manufacture CDs and DVDs will one day soon be put to use in improving the integrity of electronics in aircraft, computers and iPhones.

Thanks to a pair of grants from the U.S. Air Force, Shay Curran, associate professor of physics at UH, and his research team have demonstrated ultra-high electrical conductive properties in plastics, called polycarbonates, by mixing them with just the right amount and type of carbon nanotubes.

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Star Crust Is Ten Billion Times Stronger Than Steel

The outer crusts of so-called neutron stars (above, a neutron star in an artist's conception) are ten billion times stronger than steel—making it the strongest known material in the universe, scientists said in May 2009. Image by Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn State

From National Geographic News:

Move over, Superman.

The Man of Steel has nothing on the collapsed cores of massive snuffed-out stars, scientists say.

A new computer model suggests that the outer crusts of so-called neutron stars are the strongest known material in the universe.

To determine the breaking point of a neutron star's crust, the team modeled magnetic field stresses and crust deformation for a small region of the star's surface.

The results showed that the crust of a neutron star can withstand a breaking strain up to ten billion times the pressure it would take to snap steel.

"It sounds dramatic, but it's true," said study team member Charles Horowitz of Indiana University.

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Star Crust Is Ten Billion Times Stronger Than Steel

The outer crusts of so-called neutron stars (above, a neutron star in an artist's conception) are ten billion times stronger than steel—making it the strongest known material in the universe, scientists said in May 2009. Image by Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn State

From National Geographic News:

Move over, Superman.

The Man of Steel has nothing on the collapsed cores of massive snuffed-out stars, scientists say.

A new computer model suggests that the outer crusts of so-called neutron stars are the strongest known material in the universe.

To determine the breaking point of a neutron star's crust, the team modeled magnetic field stresses and crust deformation for a small region of the star's surface.

The results showed that the crust of a neutron star can withstand a breaking strain up to ten billion times the pressure it would take to snap steel.

"It sounds dramatic, but it's true," said study team member Charles Horowitz of Indiana University.

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Red-Hot Research Could Lead To New Materials

Photo: Two versions of the aerogel -- the RF-only version (left) and the mixed version (right). (Credit: Image courtesy of Missouri University of Science and Technology)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2009) — Recent experiments to create a fast-reacting explosive by concocting it at the nanoscopic level could result in more spectacular firework displays. But more impressive to the Missouri University of Science and Technology professor who led the research, the method used to mix chemicals at that tiny scale could lead to new strong porous materials for high temperature applications, from thermal insulation in jet engines to industrial chemical reactors.

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Carbon Nanotube Muscles Strong As Diamond, Flexible As Rubber

From Wired News:

For the next installment of the Terminator franchise, Hollywood might skip the polymimetic liquid alloys — they're so 2003 — and turn to the laboratory of Ray Baughman, who has created a next-generation muscle from carbon nanotubes.

Baughman and his colleagues have produced a formulation that's stronger than steel, as light as air and more flexible than rubber — a truly 21st century muscle. It could be used to make artificial limbs, "smart" skins, shape-changing structures, ultra-strong robots and — in the immediate future — highly-efficient solar cells.

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