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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 don't see this stuff replacing transparent aluminum anytime soon.
This is a hell of a thing if hey manage to find a way of making it stable at room teperature and pressure - a glass that has a similar strength to diamond made from a highly available source material? I can see a ridiculous number of uses for this!
open your mind too much and your brain falls out!
At room temperature, dry ice vaporizes. The only way for it to maintain its structure is under pressure. All we need to do is find some way to lower the global temperature and increase pressure...
Reminds me of the cartoon of the scientist at the blackboard with a series of equations on one side and concluding equation on the other with "And then a miracle happens." in between.
Seastead this.
Scratch-proof iPod screens of course!
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Well, we could suck all the Co2 out of the atmosphere. This would remove the greenhouse effect, both the manmade one and the naturally occuring one, and drop the planetary temperature. And we get our Co2 for making this stuff in the bargin! It's a win-win situation (well, except for the living - they'll be royally screwed - but they were just taking up space anyways).
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
For stage shows, fog machines are far more controllable and produce better results than dropping dry ice in water. They use "fog juice" rather than dry ice.
Though sometimes you'll use dry ice to cool the resulting fog. The hot fog gives you a smoky, atmospheric effect. If you want ground-hugging fog, you've got to cool it down, and dry ice is a pretty good way to chill it quickly.
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.
So are nipples. But you don't see those used in construction, do ya?
(Well, actually you do. But on the workers, not the buildings. And let's face it, those aren't nipples most of us want to see.)
Cheap flights into Elbonia often connect through the Amorphous, Carbonia international airport. Unfortunately the town's not very stable when it's warm out.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
All we have to do is start sucking up all the carbon dioxide out of the air, and convert it into little waste cubes that can be dumped in landfills or baby seal breeding grounds. It's foolproof!
the term Vaporware Windows to a whole new level!
You must write The Book, and then tear away belief. Only you can save the light of man --Gary Numan
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
You can confidently say there is no application (this millenium at least) for at least half of physics research, most astronomical or maths research, not to mention the Arts, where people would be highly offended if you even asked them for a practical application.
In this case the lens thing may not be so crackpot. SiO2, quartz, is the lens and glass material used in certain situations. Single crystal is just in the more demanding cases, but amorphous is used where possible. The size of a single crystal quartz stone is limited due to growth constraints. Chemicaly CO2 and SiO2 might bind well enough to allow the amorphous glass to be used in more situations. Don't know, been a while since I worked with eitherbut it seems like on of the first things that might be tried as soon as they get the process working.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
True, but it does consistently reward us for methodically searching for interesting things in unusual places.
Think of it as a form of assay: You assay every square mile of territory, not because you like assaying, or you think there's something worth mining in every square mile of territory, but to find out which square miles have something worth mining.
I'm not paying for science for the sake of science. I'm paying for a thorough assay of the territory.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
At least I read the article!
I am a firefighter. Actually, I'm a Lt. on an Engine company -- one of the volunteer firefighters who protect about 40% of the US population (most people don't realize how much of the US is protected by volunteer firefighters).
We train using fog machines frequently, because if something goes wrong you can remove your SCBA and breath normally.
In a training event for "Explorers" not too long ago, we used this fake smoke on a hot day. We had to cancel the use of it because several of the kids has asthma attacks. After investigating, the only explanation we could find, was that the appearance of smoke creates the expectation that it will be difficult to breathe. That expectation can be self fulfilling -- especially in young people who have had bad reactions to actual smoke in the past.
Oh well.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Well, just goes to show how useless the slashdot moderation system is.
That, or not enough people are meta-modding.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You're misunderstanding the use of the word 'stability'. All glasses are thermodynamically unstable. A glass is, essentially, a liquid that has been cooled really quickly past the melting point to a temperature at which the atoms do not have enough energy to re-arrange themselves into the thermodynamically preferred crystalline ordering. This leaves you with a thermodynamically unstable - but kinetically stable - solid that has an amorphous structure (one with no long-range atomic order).
Since this glass is also kinetically unstable, it won't remain a solid at RTP. However, it probably won't explode: it will simply crystallise, melt and evaporate as you heat it up. I suppose if you did this fast enough it might explode, but I think at 'normal' heating rates it's likely to just crack along flaws in the material to relieve internal pressure.
Of course, since you mentioned what would happen when it 'breaks'... this would require it to be at whatever conditions the glass is kinetically stable (from the article) - as I've explained above, the material won't exist as a solid at RTP and therefore cannot be broken. If it's kinetically stable, when it breaks it will just behave like a normal glass: it will fragment.
(And, yes, I am a glass scientist!)