#metal

#metal

Scientists Can Grow Super Strong 'Metallic Wood'After three years of trying, the engineers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science have succeeded in creating a new type of material they've dubbed 'metallic wood.'The new material, a lattice of nanoscale nickel struts, has high strength-to-density ratio akin to wood from trees which are strong enough to grow hundreds of feet tall but light enough to float on water.In the image above, a strip of metallic wood about 1 inch long and one-third inch wide (2.5 cm by 0.8 cm) is thinner than household aluminum foil but is capable of supporting 50 times its own weight without buckling. If the weight was suspended from it, the same strip could support more than 6 lb (2.7 lg) without breaking.The key to the metallic wood's success is the precise spacing of the nanolattic and avoiding cracks when the material is being manufactured."Our new manufacturing approach allows us to make porous metals that are three times stronger than previous porous metals at similar relative density and 1,000 times larger than other nanolattices," said professor James Pikul. "We plan to use these materials to make a number of previously impossible devices, which we are already using as membranes to separate biomaterials in cancer diagnostics, protective coatings, and flexible sensors."

Fool's Gold Actually Contains Real GoldPyrite or iron disulfide was called fool's gold because foolish prospectors would mistake it for real gold. But research showed that pyrite can actually contain real gold!From The Conversation:When crystals stretch or twist, the bonds between neighbouring atoms are broken and remade, forming billions of tiny imperfections called “dislocations”, each roughly 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, or 100 times smaller than a virus particle....Our research reveals that dislocations within pyrite crystals can be “decorated” with gold atoms. This is particularly common where the crystals have been twisted during their history; here, gold can be present at concentrations several times higher than in the rest of the crystal.Image: Uoaei1/Wikimedia Commons