Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world

The Sunday Times ^ | August 19, 2007 | Abul Taher

[marvlus]

A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.

Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.

[Captainpaintball]

Aerogel has ben used for over 10 years as a cone material in speaker drivers, most notably mid-bass, and midranges by French company Audax.

[USNBandit]

A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts....

Gee, I was hoping not to have to worry about bomb blasts near my home. I guess the neighborhood really is going down hill.

[Bender2]

Re: ...it's nice to know there are so many twisted people here!

Crrrrrackllllllllllllllllllllllle [Sound of slow smile breaking]

BTW... You cannot call yourself an ex-lawyer unless you are correctly an ex-con! And when will "To be continued…" continue?

[steve86]

Drafts (the through-the-wall kind) are a function of infiltration not insulation, but I suppose a severe lack of insulation would cause advective air currents inside the house.

I agree with your comment about the human factor and tending to turn the thermostat up -- but this is a separate issue again from the efficiency and ontimes of the HVAC system.

[RightWhale]

I handled it gingerly, and didn't poke or prod it

Same here, but it broke anyway.

[gulfcoast6]

Hope they make cars out of this stuff, I for one will buy on for my daughter for sure, the cars of today don’t survive the teen age drivers.

[Vince Ferrer]

This stuff has been around for over a decade. If it hasn’t changed the world by now, it’s not going to.

It is typical for a new invention or new material to take 10-20 years to leave the laboratory and become part of a new consumer product. There are a lot of design issues and manufacturing problems that need to be ironed out.

[TN4Liberty]

If they figure out how to recycle it, would that be second-hand frozen smoke?

[steve86]

I read about this in an issue of Action Comics published back in the 60s.

That is because it was discovered in Roswell in the 40s.

[HitmanLV]

In the comic, Lex Luthor invented it. But they probably changed the names and circumstances to protect the Roswell secrets.

[montag813]

But will it do the dishs and babysit the kids?

Perhaps it can be used in diapers? "Withstands up to 1,000 poopies without a change!"

[TN4Liberty]

I learned early on that when a diaper package says “18-25 lbs” if is referring to the size of the baby, not the capacity of the diaper.

[UCANSEE2]

bookmark

[ReignOfError]

This stuff has been around for over a decade. If it hasn’t changed the world by now, it’s not going to.

This stuff has been around since the 1930s. But what's changing is more creative uses for it and better methods of making it more inexpensively and reliably.

I don't know where you're getting the notion that scientific advances aren't important if they're old enough to shave. Petroleum was known for thousands of of years before the first car, and coal for thousands of years before the first steam engine. Artificial fibers existed for decades before anyone found a reliable and cost-effective way of making fabrics from them. Rubber was known for centuries before vulcanization made it useful. Iron was used for centuries before we figured out how ti turn it into steel.

There is an aluminum cap at the top of the Washington Monument -- its high conductivity made it an ideal lightning rod, it was more durable than soft gold, and it wouldn't stain the white stone as a copper cap would have. At the time, aluminum was well-known, and was considered a precious metal; when the method of refining bauxite on a large scale became practical, it became an everyday material.

The laser was invented at Bell Labs in 1957, 25 years before the CD used it as a means of reading data from a tiny, shiny disc.

Transistors were patented at Bell Labs long before they started replacing vacuum tubes in radios, TVs and primitive computers. The Integrated Circuit was patented in 1959, decades before it would revolutionize nearly everything we do in an average day.

Philo T. Farnesworth got his first television patent in 1930, log before television would change forever the way people get information and entertainment.

Paper existed for centuries in China before Johannes Guttenberg fed it into a printing press and made mass media possible.

The technology for switching a radio signal among a network of transceivers, a key innovation that makes cellular telephones possible, is based on patents issued in the 1940s. One of those patents was issued to Hedy Lamarr, the movie star, who had the idea when he was transposing on a piano. She thought it could lead to an unjammable torpedo.

Robert Goddard fired his first liquid-fueled rocket 30 years before Sputnik.

It was at least 30 years after Orville and Wilbur Wright flew an airplane before passenger aviation became remotely practical, and even then the mart money was on dirigibles. It wasn't until the DC-3 that planes offered a serious challenge to passenger travel by ship or rail.

The key technologies behind packet-switched networks, distributed computing, the Internet Protocol, the Transfer Connect Protocol, error correction, and so on that form the foundation of the Internet were all established in the '70s.

And on and on and on. History is rife with inventions that sat in a desk drawer until someone found a use for them. Who knows what's sitting in a desk drawer now?

[Liberty Valance]

bttt

[AndyTheBear]

How long before the Libs seek monies from Big Frozen Smoke in order to pay for the health costs they attribute to 2nd hand frozen smoke....

As soon as they start turning big profits.

[grey_whiskers]

There is hardly anything more fragile than aerogel.

Anti-liberal esoteric tech Sarcasm Torpedo ARMED. FIRE!!

Except a liberal's ego...(sniff) :-(

Cheers!

[Lx]

My A/C is set to 62 right now, yet it’s still only 79 in the house. If I had better insulation, I could set it at 72 and leave it alone. This is because the air is leaving, or coming into, the house faster than the unit can cool it.

That might be your problem but more likely are two other issues:

1) You need more refrigerant added to your unit. Mine seems to need a pound or two every two years.

2) Your unit is of insufficient tonnage. It doesn't have the capacity to cool your house because it's undersized. My last house had a huge A/C unit and I could keep the house at 68 degrees in 110 degree heat. My new house's A/C is slightly undersized so if I don't keep the house cool, it doesn't have the capacity to bring down the temp though it will cool the house. My wife and I fight over this all the time since I hate the heat.

[bannie]

Well, we have the smoke supply right here right now!

Bakersfield, CA has had YELLOW or yellow-brown skies for days (in the late afternoon/evenings) for a number of days! Yesterday our cars were covered with ash, and you could catch it as it fell.

The smoke (!) from Santa Barbara's fire is wafting west, and we're trapping it here against our southern and western mountains. Please take it, freeze it and get it out of here!!!

Late yesterday afternoon, the skies were so yellow that it looked unreal! At other times, it truly looked like a futuristic movie like Soylent Green!!!

[ReignOfError]

ReignOfError has right. The differential between your room temperature and your thermostat reading depends on how far apart they are located. Ideally, the stat temp reads what the room does and insulation changes will be reflected in how often the AC or heater cycles. Changing the stat changes the room temp.

In an ideal, modern, integrated system, there would be temperature sensors in each room. The system could adjust valves on each duct, to blow more heated/cooled air to the rooms that are lagging behind, and keep the temperature uniform. Such systems exist, but they're still pricey and not terribly widespread.

The differential comes in with open doors and windows, obviously. If the change in insulation were THAT significant, yeah, it would matter. Real world, I don’t see the differential being significant based on type of insulation.

An open window and a drafty window differ only as a matter of degree. Another factor is where the sun is hitting most directly at a given time of day. I live in a brick house, and on a cool night after a hot day, the exterior wall is noticeably warm to the touch. Better insulation inside the walls keeps that heat out.

In the wintertime, wind direction has a lot to do with the temperature differential, too, especially if you have old single-hung windows or clapboard walls. My house has thick plaster walls that do a pretty good job of insulating from one room to another -- in winter, I close off the heating vents in the rooms that I don't use much, and keep the doors closed, and those rooms stay about 10° cooler than the rest of the house.