Also, there's gonna be a gotcha, the result is too good to be true, right? Well, yes, the gotcha is that the samples produced in the lab that were "5x ligther and 4x stronger than steel" had a particle size of about 3 microns. The larger particles had properties much worse than the smaller ones. So, if you imagine that one day we'll be able to create this material in sizes measured in centimeters, or meters, then for the time being we have no evidence that they'll have anything close to the strength mentioned in the title.
Here's the relevant quote:
>To this end, samples within a size range of 1.2–8 μm were compressed, with the majority of lattices tested clustering around 3 μm. The cubic geometry of the nanolattice allowed for the direct uniaxial compression of nanolattices sitting upright on a silicon substrate. Small nanolattices (edge length < 3 μm) with a high yield strength of above 2 GPa typically yielded a significant plastic deformation (Figures 2A, 2B, and S8; Videos S1 and S2). Large nanolattices (edge length > 3 μm) tended to fail with one or two sudden bursts (Figures 2C and 2D) wherein little to no plastic deformation occurred in the sample prior to fracture. About 54% of large nanolattices exhibited complete brittle fracture.
Thank you for linking the paper. The “news” article is so badly written, I feel like maybe it was written by a low parameter LLM fine tuned on children’s books.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...
Also, there's gonna be a gotcha, the result is too good to be true, right? Well, yes, the gotcha is that the samples produced in the lab that were "5x ligther and 4x stronger than steel" had a particle size of about 3 microns. The larger particles had properties much worse than the smaller ones. So, if you imagine that one day we'll be able to create this material in sizes measured in centimeters, or meters, then for the time being we have no evidence that they'll have anything close to the strength mentioned in the title.
Here's the relevant quote: