Six times lighter than air, 5,000 times less dense than water, and four times lighter than the previous record holder.
A mesh of carbon nanotubes, the material can carry up to 40,000 times its own weight, is hydrophobic, conductive and can be compressed to one 30th of its original size
Over the last few decades, we have become unbelievably spoiled with technology. Everything is becoming faster, slimmer, lighter and more efficient. The materials that we produce our gadgets with are becoming more impressive seemingly by the day.
By now you’ve probably heard of graphene, if not you can read more about it’s potential capabilities here. Graphene has been lauded as the perfect future material for our technological needs, but it does have one major flaw: it conducts electricity too well at this point to be used in electronics. Graphene in it’s purest form is unable to control the electricity flowing through it; it would thus be difficult to make future gadgets out of it. Fortunately, there have been a couple of recent major breakthroughs in the supermaterial realm including a genetic modification to graphene and a material cousin. Both hold a lot of promise for the future of sweet gadgets.
Graphene is the strongest material known to man at 200 times stronger than steel. It is the thinnest possible material feasible, and scientists have said that it almost conducts electricity too well to be used in computers. If you had a saran-wrap thin piece of graphene, an elephant standing on a pencil might not be able to break it. Graphene has the properties to revolutionize electronics and countless other aspects of the world. It may very well change our lives forever.