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Scientists Turn Gold Into Foam That's Nearly As Light As Air (www.ethz.ch)
Zothecula writes: Along with its use in jewelry, gold also has numerous applications in fields such as electronics and scientific research. It's a handy material, but – of course – it's also expensive. That's why researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a new way of making a small amount of gold go a long way. They've created a gold foam that looks much like solid gold, but is actually 98 parts air and two parts solid material (abstract). As an added bonus, the aerogel-type foam can also be made in non-gold colors such as dark red.
I guess its novel to use the method with gold, but the idea is more then 100yrs old.
Step 1) Turn gold into foam.
Step 2) Make gold look red.
Step 3)....
Step 4) Loss!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the market is under-served by not having non-gold gold.
The implications for the hip-hop and gold-tooth industries are staggering, as suddenly bling is no longer confined to being gold, but can be other non-gold colors.
People have been saying for years that gold should come in other colors, as gold was just too damned boring.
When asked if creating non-gold gold would create confusion among buyers of gold, as well as creating higher change of fraud due to non-gold-gold gold being produced to be represented as non-gold gold, representatives declined comment citing they were not authorized to speculate on such drivel.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
i suppose i have to look into this whole "gold" business but as far as i can tell it is a rather harmless material with mostly archaic and sentimental values. ... ..errr ... trees to keep the fire and experimenting going ^_^
i would bet that it was even THE first metal to be close to the very first fires made by the monkeys who were crying around the tree/home that was struck by lightning
anyway they quickly moved on to throwing other rocks into the fire to see if it might yield something stronger and more lighter and useful to chop down homes
Nonetheless, that's actually pretty neat.
"With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone."
A pound of gold or a pound of feathers?
Does the conductivity change?
If the same scientists used bitcoin the final material would have been 100% hot air.
Stop thinking gold is a suitable alternative!
Now I can buy a gold clock, massive gold chains, and wear it like I'm black around my neck, and it will weigh next to nothing. But I'll look so gangsta. All the other niggas will be wanting to pop a cap in my head to steal my bling. :)
Make items with a core of some heavy base metal. Cover with a fairly thick layer of this stuff. Sell as a solid gold item. Since it's not just a plating scratch tests won't wear through to the base metal.
density of gold: 11,340 kg/m^3
density of air: 1.225 kg/m^3
the solid 2% of the material contain 80% gold
(ignoring vol% vs mass% because the article doesn't say which)
11,340 * 0.02 * 0.8 = 181.44
So the material should have a density of > 180 kg/m^3. That's still two orders of magnitude above the density of air.
Another way for QVC to rip off old folks.
And once again, they've got it all backwards! I mean, if they could turn foam into gold... that'd be nice trick!
I think somebody was a bit drunk when reading the basics of Alchemy...
Pah. Doctor Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker were decades ahead of them - gold into foam? Useless! Try gold into cottage cheese - low in cholesterol, high in vitamins...
Nice feat, but does this also have a practical usage, or is this a purely academic exercise? From the article: 'But in contrast to its conventional form, it is soft and malleable by hand' - so not quite usable for jewelry. Where gold is used for its conductivity, it is mostly used as plating, not as solid or foamy object. So ... what am I missing?
"Sarge, we couldn't find any contraband on the smugglers. They are only exporting pillows this time."
Table-ized A.I.
This will make it even more profitable to salt mines before leading "investors" through...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The part where it slowly condenses into a solid material the greater pressure builds has be intrigued how this could be used for deep sea exploration where the deeper you go the more air tight and stable the structure becomes.
First step toward transparent aluminum?
All I ever see is sexism on this webpage
Where is the articles about women discovering/inventing stuff?
We spend billions to get women into STEM and not a single story about a woman inventing/discovering ANYTHING?
Actually if radiation is aligned with a crystal lattice it interacts even more with the material and the radiation length (the distance travelled before 1/e of the particles interact on average) gets shorter. However this only happens if the radiation is aligned to within a few milli-radians of the symmetry axis of the crystal (and most metal you encounter is not a single crystal). I actually measured this effect as part of my PhD thesis for an application in the main particle physics experiment I was working on.
So no, this material will probably be no more effective than the same mass of gold in a thin, but solid, sheet. Radiation shielding with matter is a statistical affair and the fewer nuclei you have the less shielding you get. I'm also surprised that they suggest a use in jewelry since they also describe it as easily malleable, far more so than solid gold. Still it is interesting.
I wonder if they will accept it for purchases at Dairy Queen.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Pah, I can do way better. If you send me a bar of 24k gold, I will return to you a mason jar filled with a gold foam that is so thin and light you can't even see it...