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Graphene Aerogel Takes World's Lightest Material Crown
cylonlover writes "Not even a year after it claimed the title of the world's lightest material, aerographite has been knocked off its crown by a new aerogel made from graphene. Created by a research team from China's Zhejiang University in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering lab headed by Professor Gao Chao, the ultra-light aerogel has a density of just 0.16 mg/cm3, which is lower than that of helium and just twice that of hydrogen."
I'm assuming that the 'density' figure given is a 'weight of graphene in a given volume' one, rather than one that includes the gasses occupying the pores/cells of the material?
It would be quite shocking indeed if something largely saturated in nitrogen and oxygen were less dense than helium...
Make a bag around it. Remove the air. We have an airship with the lift somewhere between H and He.
So how strong is the aerogel? How big a bag can we make and have it support atmospheric pressure on the other side? That will really determine the lift efficiency.
Obviously not 'lightest', but 'least dense'. Sheesh, editors - do your JOB! The /. title should be "Silly folk at Gizmag confuse mass with density when describing world's least dense solid.'
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The insulative properties are also pretty dramatic. There is another picture floating around with some crayons in place of the flower. That little stunt might not work as well with carbon aerogels as it does with silica ones, though...
The density is measured including its interior space. In reality the interior space is filled with air and its realtive weight is the carbon structure alone.
To make it float you would have to find a way to seal off the interior structure and remove the air from that.
Vacuum is a gas in the eyes of Christian fundamentalists. Just like Atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby, and off is a TV channel.
I like "off"; there's less re-runs than the other channels.
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Graphene Aerogel Takes World's Lightest Material Crown
A crown should weigh heavy on a ruler's brow, lest he forget the weight of his responsibility.
What makes this so different from, say, creating a hollow cube with some very fine polymer for the vertices, with the faces and interior remaining empty? If something's full of holes, is its density still measurable in a meaningful way? A battleship is less dense than water in this sense, but the material it's made from isn't.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Given that all aerogels are extremely tenuous foams, I would strongly suspect that all of them are pretty good insulators(even if one were made of a very good conductor of heat, like silver, there is just so little solid and so much trapped-gas-pocket that good insulation is to be suspected). However, if the aerogel is made of a material that burns in oxygen, the same combination of a tiny amount of solid with plenty of gas probably results in a very swift burn once you get it started.
I'd suspect that a carbon aerogel would be only slightly worse as an insulator than a silica one; but I wouldn't try taking a blowtorch to it(except to see what happens...)
Well, it should be possible to make it less squishy (carbon makes diamonds, after all). Cover it with some other graphene variant in low pressure, and one just might manage to make a lighter-than-air solid. I'd avoid the torch, though.
This is why no one under the age of 32 today has any fundamental understanding of the English language. ... This is why they put their punctuation inside of quotation marks even when the punctuation is not part of the thing being quoted...
Funny, APA, MLA, and the Chicago Manual of Style all recommend putting the period inside the quotation at the end of the sentence even if the original quotation does not have a period. And my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style is older than 32 years. Not that I put much effort into writing random forum posts and I'm sure I make plenty of mistakes. But if one were to try to argue technically about what is the correct approach, at best you can argue it is a stylistic choice. Otherwise, you are going against what are essentially the authorities in many circles of writing.
The convention in the United States for decades has been to places periods inside the quotation marks. All others are based on the actual quote. The Chicago Manual of Style, as one of many, recommends this, but most guides point out that the British style placing anything not part of the quote outside of the quotation marks is acceptable but may be seen as unusual to American readers--of all ages.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.