ultralight metallic microlattice

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[color=#0000FF][b]The material in the picture above is made out of 90% nickel, but Bill Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL, said it can be made out of other materials as well -- the nickel version was just the easiest to make.[/b][/color]

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Scientists invent lightest material on Earth. What now?
L.A. Times: November 17, 2011

<<Scientists have invented a new material that is so lightweight it can sit atop a fluffy dandelion without crushing the little fuzzy seeds. It's so lightweight, styrofoam is 100 times heavier. It is so lightweight, in fact, that the research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech say in the peer-reviewed Nov. 18 issue of Science that it is the lightest material on Earth, and no one has asked them to run a correction yet. That's light!

The material has been dubbed "ultralight metallic microlattice," and according a news release sent out by UC Irvine, it consists of 99.99% air thanks to its "microlattice" cellular architecture. "The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said in the release. To understand the structure of the material, think of the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge -- which are both light and weight efficient -- but on a nano-scale.

As for the uses of such a material? That's still to be determined. Lorenzo Valdevit, UCI's principal investigator on the project, brought up impact protection, uses in the aerospace industry, acoustic dampening and maybe some battery applications.

In the meantime, we asked Bill Carter what would happen if we threw this material in the air and waited for it to fall to the ground. "It’s sort of like a feather -- it floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density," he 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.">>

[Ann]

This micro-wave-proof nano chocolate caffè latte is so light-weight that it might float out of its glass at any moment. Lifting it to your mouth and tilting it towards your lips will help it escape from its container. The spiral chocolate grid provides the latte with some sort of anchor to its receptacle. Due to its foamy fluffiness spilled nano chocolate caffè latte will seep slowly to the floor, rather than just fall unhindered straight down the way ordinary coffee will do.

Ann

[Beyond]

Scientists invent lightest material on Earth. What now?

Why, take it to the moon of course and drop it alongside a heavy hammer. Or be less exotic and just do it in a vacuum chamber.

[neufer]

[color=#0000FF]This illustration shows nearly all of the 1,235 potential alien planet candidates from NASA's Kepler mission. The planets are shown crossing front of their host stars, which are to scale. The position of each dot gives you an idea of the path each planet takes. Click image to see the full family portrait.[/color] Credit: Jason Rowe and Kepler team

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Alien planet family portrait
Posted on November 25, 2011 by astrobob

<<704 and counting. So stands the latest tally of extrasolar planet discoveries. And that’s not all. An additional 1,235 planet candidates found by NASA’s Kepler space telescope are awaiting confirmation. Soon we’ll know of more planets than the number of naked eye stars visible on a clear, dark night.

Kepler was launched in 2009 and has been monitoring the brightness of 156,000 stars in the constellation Cygnus the Swan looking for telltale dips in their light that would indicate a passing planet. Only planets in the line of sight between Earth and a star can be found with this method, but with such a large sample, the detections have been many. If a planet is present, its passage will dim the star at repeated intervals by an amount that depends on its size. Larger planets mean bigger dips.

While only 25 Kepler planets have been confirmed, the majority should be soon. Among its finds is Kepler-7b, one of the lightest planets known, with a density [approaching that of] styrofoam. It’s half the mass of Jupiter but 1.5 times its size. Light and airy as they come, this alien world would float on water or blow away in a suitably titanic windstorm. At the other end of the spectrum Kepler-10b is just 1.4 times the size of Earth and dense as iron.>>