5 Crazy New Man-Made Materials

What will they think of next? Aluminum bubble wrap! Molecular superglue! And how about that titanium foam? It's as simple as coating a piece of polyurethane foam with titanium, and then getting rid of the foam. Neat, but this next part is even better:

The exact properties depend on the porosity of the foam, but the results are strong and—most importantly—incredibly light. In fact, the material is just perfect for replacing bone: it has incredibly similar mechanical properties and, because it's porous, new bone can grow and around its structure, truly integrating the implant within the skeleton. Anything that gets us that much closer to a real-life Wolverine is okay in our book.

Read about five such brave new materials and what they may be good for at Gizmodo. Link


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Things like aerogel are open celled foam, meaning all of the cavities connect to each other (like the structure in the picture here), so it will fill up with any fluid it is put into. Typically the density of such foams are given not counting the mass of the air that fills them up normally when sitting out, and assumes that is empty space or that the weight of air is not an issue. The density not taking into account the empty spaces still is much heavier than air, so it doesn't float.
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these materials are certainly amazing, but their saying that Graphene Aerogel is less dense then Helium just strikes me as just... wrong. If something's less dense then air, it should float, not "practically float", and even with listed numbers, my knowledge about chemistry is sort of blowing a horn... I'm not claiming to be all knowing, I'm just saying this is a pretty simple concept - denser things sink, less dense things float.

That being said, I loves me some graphene and if that aerogel can hold 900x its own weight in oil, bring it on, that's amazing all by itself.
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