A laser hit the tiny black cube, and it lurched forward almost at once. That split-second jump, caught during a zero-gravity ...

Recombinant spider silk produced by living organisms, ultra-light carbon fiber composites, and next-generation aerogels are no longer lab curiosities, they are already in hospitals, on battlefields, ...

Known as "frozen smoke" because of their milky translucent appearance, aerogels are among the world's lightest solid materials. Consisting of 99.8 percent air, they're highly heat-resistant and are an ...

Space travel has long involved heavy lifting. To reach a destination, the spacecraft has ...

Aerogel is about as perfect a contradiction as you could imagine. It holds the record as the lightest solid ever created, yet is durable enough to support the weight of a car or survive the vacuum of ...

A serendipitous discovery at Stanford revealed the properties of a material that changes form when exposed to flame. The finding holds promise for a spray coating that could protect homes from fire ...

Aerogel, a literal space-age material, could provide electric motors and devices with crucial shielding to protect neighboring electronic components without the need for heavier metal-based coverings.

Porous materials are widely used for gas storage, separation, catalysis, and environmental purification. Their functionality arises from nanoscale pores that allow molecules to be selectively captured ...

Cellulose may have been around for millions of years, but that doesn’t mean it can’t teach a modern substance like aerogels a thing or two. A group of researchers have found a way to use cellulose to ...

A new collection of chemically diverse dome-celled ultralight aerogels with high porosity and very low density feature elasticity and mechanical properties that remain intact even under extreme ...