An article in the Los Angeles Times has reported that a team of scientists from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories, and Caltech, have invented the lightest material on earth.

Contrary to its mouthful of a name, the new material ‘ultralight metallic microlattice’ is said to be so lightweight, it’s 100 times lighter than Styrofoam—and “it can sit atop a fluffy dandelion without crushing the little fuzzy seeds”.

“The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," Tobias Shandler of HRL Laboratories said.

99% of the material consists of air, because of its “microlattice” cellular architecture—visually, its structure is liken to a nano-scale of the Eiffel Tower or Golden Gate Bridge.

The material may be used for aerospace industries, acoustic dampening, and battery applications.

How long will it take for the material to fall to the ground?

“It’s sort of like a feather—it floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density,” Bill Carter, manager of the group from HRL said. “It takes more than 10 seconds, for instance, for the lightest material we’ve made to fall if you drop it from shoulder height.”

[via Los Angeles Times]


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