Future comic book heroes may be referred to as Men of Spongy Steel if one researcher’s experimental metal makes it out of the lab and into real-world applications.
You need to cut up some chunks of steel. Mechanical tools are prone to wearing out and lasers are just too expensive, so what do you use? Fast-cutting electromagnetic pulses, what else.
A teaspoon of this stuff would weigh 100 million tons, and the only thing more dense is a black hole. Space is weird.
In a crushing blow for vegetarians worldwide, a cucumber doused in vegetable oil has been proven inferior to prosciutto when tasked with cutting through steel sheet metal. Pork: 1, PETA: 0.
If you walked into a friend’s house to see this 2.5m stainless steel hourglass, you’d probably think he makes too much money. If he unfolded the sculpture for 10-person dinner seating, you’d know it.
Flying in a plane made of a material called ‘buckypaper’ may not seem too appealing at first, but this new type of carbon nanotube may be the future of lightweight, high strength composite. Discovered accidentally while trying to create the same conditions that exist in a star, buckypaper is far from reaching its potential, but what a potential it is.
Carbon nanotubes have been popping on Giz for a while, touted as one of the next wonder-materials—but a new development in their manufacture means they may not remain “future technology” for long. In fact the work of a team at CSIRO and the University of Texas at Dallas means that commercial-scale production of sheets of carbon nanotube “textile” is possible at up to seven metres per minute.
