New World's Lightest Material
Carbon Aerogel Zhejiang University NewsThis one's made of carbon, and it's super absorbent, too! Check out this contender for the title of "world's lightest solid." To demonstrate just how light it is, Zhejiang University in China, where the material's creators are based, has published pictures of chunks of it perched on small leaves, held aloft by grass seedheads and floating on the stamen of a cherry blossom. Ah, springtime. It's still in its earliest stages of development, but in the future, the new material could be designed to soak up oil spills or clean other pollutants, Gao Chao, the lead scientist in creating the material, told China Daily. The materials used now to clean up spills absorb 10 times their weight in oil, but the new stuff can handle 900 times its weight in oil. And it absorbs quickly, Chao said, with each gram of material sucking up 69...