Scientists Unveil "World's Lightest Material"

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Even lighter then aerogel?

Looks like it's in the same range, and the lightest form of this that they've made may even be slightly lighter than the lightest aerogels. They have extremely different properties otherwise, though, so they'd have very different uses.

 

[StANDY1338]

Its almost like, carbon fiber nano tubes?

 

[BehattedWanderer]

The material's architecture allows unprecedented mechanical behavior for a metal, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50 percent strain and extraordinarily high energy absorption.

Wow. That is some nice recovery. Elastic deformation like that in a metal is pretty rare. So, awesome. And hooray for nanomaterials.

Yeah, I was pretty surprised by this. There's a video that shows just how well the material handles this much strain that's pretty crazy looking:

<youtube=GlGvL1CMl5E>

Whoa. 98% recovery to initial size? That's quite impressive. I wonder what kind of load they're applying.

 

[Racecarlock]

I wonder if I'll wake up next week and personal space ships will have been invented. Then maybe I could live out my wing commander fantasies. Or orbiter flight sim fantasies at least.

 

[Cyfu]

AWESOME! and they should call it Mithril. that would be fucking awesome!

 

[Leemaster777]

So... much... science... I'm beginning to feel like the Professor:


As for a name, I agree that Mithril would be a kickass name indeed.

 

[Logic 0]

Who would not want to wear a suit of that stuff?

 

[kouriichi]

So the worlds best chainmail armor will be made of tiny suits of chainmail armor connected by even tinier pieces of chainmail armor?

Wonder how well it handles a mace.....

 

[algalon]

It's actually a series of tubes!

 

[Dott]

Any chance that I can get my bones made out of this stuff so that I can fly?

People have been using orbital drops in science fiction for ages.
Now we can just jump out of planes and glide merrily into the fray.

 

[The Code]

Inb4 'Mithril'.

Holy shit, I really am 'inb4' Mithril! Yeah, I thought Mithril.

I better not be the only one who thought of the line "light as a feather, hard as dragon scales" when I read that.

DO IT.

 

[Volkov]

Flammability?

 

[Sir Shockwave]

Two fun thoughts -

A) Someone's invented Sturginium.

B) FINALLY we have a lightweight and strong metal good enough for making Giant Robots out of X3

 

[CulixCupric]

Inb4 'Mithril'.

Holy shit, I really am 'inb4' Mithril! Yeah, I thought Mithril.

light as a feather, and as strong as dragon scales.

 

[ExileNZ]

FOR SCIENCE!!!

(Yes, I did just finish Portal 2).

Seriously though, that's some pretty impressive metal, particularly its recovery rate.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

I will be angry if they don't call this mithril. Let it be called mithril. For the love of god, name this marvel mithril.

 

[Denamic]

Ye gods.
We've invented mithril.

 

[otakon17]

The first real life Mega Damage material, RIFTS was RIGHT! The end is nigh!

 

[Jonluw]

Huh.
And I was just a little while ago busying myself with imagining what it would be like with a material that's arranged like chainmail on a molecular level.
Maybe it won't be as impossible as I thought.

You're not saying anything about how much it costs to produce this material though...
I remember being super excited about graphene (which is awesome by the way) until I found out that producing it is so ludicrously expensive it's practically useless in anything other than microchips.

 

[similar.squirrel]

This could be great for portable computers and so forth. Alongside the usual raghead-killing applications that stuff like this is initially snapped up for by our Brave Boys.