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Dry Ice Made into Super-tough Glass
janus zeal writes "A form of solid carbon dioxide that could be used to make ultra-hard glass or coatings for microelectronic devices has been discovered.
The material, named amorphous carbonia, was created by scientists from the University of Florence in Italy.
Writing in the journal Nature, the team says the material was theoretically possible but had never been created.
It was made by squeezing dry ice, a form of carbon dioxide used to create smoke in stage shows, at huge pressure.
Scientists are interested in the new material because of the potential applications. Also, they believe it could give them clues to the processes that happen in the center of huge gas giant planets such as Jupiter."
I'm not on campus (it's saturday, wee!), so I can't access the original Nature article, but I have a feeling the "stable at room temp" bit was misinterpreted by the BBC writers. I really don't see any practical way to keep the molecules together at room temp and atmospheric pressure - there's a reason CO2 is a gas. Silicon glass is a sort of weird case - most materials that show a glassy transition do it at a much lower temperature, or are largely temperature independent. When people try to run simulations to describe glassy behavior, they generally assume zero-temperature and quenched disorder.
FWIW, I spent the last two years working on computational study of spin glasses, and am working on my PhD in soft condensed matter, of which glasses are a huge part.
With my experience in scientific publications (especially physics!) there is usually a paragraph at the beginning of every paper trying to find some practical application. Probably 50% of these applications are pure horseshit thought up at the last minute. A lot of us do things for the sake of better understanding the world around us, and don't really know if there will be a practical application. And, if there DOES turn out to be an application, it's sometimes something we certainly didn't predict.
I haven't read the Nature article yet, but I have a feeling the "understand a planet and coat lenses" bit was thrown in as fluff to justify the research. It's pretty much accepted practice, and I know I'm not the only one who barely glances at the first paragraph in most papers.
No, it's like glass, except with carbon replacing the silicon.
Glass doesn't flow either (except in geologic time scales) http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glas s/glass.html
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_120.html