Synthetic Materials Set New World Record For Greatest Amount of Surface Area 96
Zothecula writes "Researchers at Northwestern University, Illinois, have broken a world record in the creation of two synthetic materials, named NU-109 and NU-110, which have the greatest amount of surface areas of any material to date (abstract). To put this into perspective: if one were able to take a crystal of NU-110 the size of a grain of salt, and somehow unfold it, the surface area would cover a desktop. Additionally, the internal surface area of just one gram of the new material would cover one-and-a-half football fields."
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Containment Procedures: Ummm...a small box?
SI units, please (Score:5, Insightful)
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From TFA it seems to be 7,000 m2/g.
Re:SI units, please (Score:5, Funny)
How many magic bags of holding is it comparable to?
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(Trick question. It's always comparable to one.)
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Actually it is the inverse of a bag of holding. A bag of holding has a small surface area for a huge internal volume.
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one desk = the surface area of a 30pack of Budweiser
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Sorry, this is /.
That surface area is the same as Bill Gates home+garage on Lake Washington. (Really.)
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1.2 baseball fields = 1 football field or if you prefer
one desk = the surface area of a 30pack of Budweiser
You darn americans with your strange units of measurement...
How many Heinekens does it measure?
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Heineken?? Fuck that shit! PABST BLUE RIBBON!
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Heineken?? Fuck that shit!
Taking into account the inner metric diameter of the neck of a Heineken bottle, I regret to inform you that your request cannot be granted due to mechanical incompatibilities.
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swooooosh...
Blue Velvet [youtube.com]
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Ah... never seen that movie :)
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You should be more worried about the outer diameter. Ouch.
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The guy you quoted is wrong. Unfold a 30 pack beer box and it's a very small desk.; a desk is a little less than two meters wide and a little more than a meter the other way. And a can of Heinie is the same size and shape as a can of Bud; liquid containers here actually use metric measurements, although there's a conversiion printed on the label.
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1 Heineken is about 0.7 regular beers from the bottles they sell around here...
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You people have football fields too.
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we do indeed, but they arent like yours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football_playing_field [wikipedia.org]
they arent of a regulation size either.
which brings us back to: SI units, please
Re:SI units, please (Score:5, Funny)
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That would be 1.46e32 barns.
(Or 0.0146 km squared if you want to be boring...)
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That's what I get for skimming the abstract. 0.0146km^2/g is the hypothetical maximum surface area they have determined through computational simulations. The actual surface area of the material they have conceived is around 7000 m^2/g.
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I'm not American enough to remember how big a "football field" is.
about three quarters of an Association pitch.
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How small are these objects? Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesnt surface area lose meaning at a small enough scale? E.g. What is the surface area of an atom? Of the electrons and protons and quarks it contains? Isnt this like trying to find the length of an edge on a fractal?
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The point is to convey scale, and for the vast majority of people, salt, desktop, gram and football field do a better job of that than 1x10-4 m^3, 1 m^2, gram and 5000 m^2.
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A football pitch is roughly one acre. Which is still not SI, but is one furlong by one chain if that helps.
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an american football field on the other hand is 120 x 53 and 1/3 yards.
Well, that explains why the Bills keep losing: they've been stopping after 100!
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Could we have the equivalent of "a desktop" and "one-and-a-half football fields" in a more scientific unit? I'm not American enough to remember how big a "football field" is.
What does a "football field" have to do with America? Yes an American Football field size isn't the same as the rest of the world Football field... But it is close enough for this article.
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I'd roughly estimate a football field to be between 0.1 and 0.2 Libraries of Congress.
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Well, there's not such thing as a standard desktop, so your guess is as good as mine on that. A US football field, however, is 120 yards long (including the end zones) by 160 feet wide, so it's 57,600 square feet, or 6400 square yards.
Now we know (Score:2)
where the socks disappear
And to put this in perspective further... (Score:3)
What was the previous record? This is a lousy article, since it gives us no reason to think that this is really a breakthrough. From the description it sounds like an aerogel.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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No good as a water filter - no matter how much you pour in it just vanishes....
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No good as a water filter - no matter how much you pour in it just vanishes
My god, someone invented Thiotimoline!! [wikipedia.org]
Re:What are the implications? (Score:4, Informative)
Catalysis, gas storage, filtering, scaffolds for molecular construction etc.
Extremely high surface area materials are already extensively used in chemistry for this sort of thing.
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Drug delivery.
Re:What are the implications? (Score:5, Funny)
(Hey, I have nothing against Mexicans or even light drugs like the weed, really.)
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I am co-author on this paper. Yes, it can potentially be used as a water filter! The pores of these MOFs are too small to trap a virus, but there are other MOFs that could do that potentially.
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would it be a possible replacement for activated carbon as an adsorbent?
would it be reusable?
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too SMALL to trap a virus?
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Re:What are the implications? (Score:5, Insightful)
Depending on its electrical properties it could be a component of an ultracapacitor.
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Depending on its electrical properties it could be a component of an ultracapacitor.
...or a very tiny antenna. (similar to the way they are using fractal antennae.)
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But if there was a way to create plates it could be a component of an ultracapacitor.
The OP was asking what the possible uses might be. I made one up. That's all anyone else did who replied, too.
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Potentially oil refining. Many processes in the oil industry such as fluidised catalytic cracking rely on a catalyst with really large surface area to control the thermal cracking of hydrocarbons. The question is, for it to be useful in many chemical and process plants, will it survive being heated to 700degC
Capacitor (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how large a capacitor density could e made with this stuff?
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Ahh hell, that's *exactly* the first thing I was thinking... I remember when aerogel came out...
It's bigger... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It's bigger... (Score:5, Funny)
A video about MOFs (Score:3, Informative)
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This is a very illustrative video, worth spending a few minutes on if you are new to this topic like I am.
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Doesn't aerogel specify density more than surface area? I mean yes, it has a huge surface area, but that wasn't the single identifying characteristic.
Pedantry FTW (Score:2)
which have the greatest amount of surface areas of any material to date
if one were able to take a crystal of NU-110 the size of a grain of salt, and somehow unfold it, the surface area would cover a desktop.
That's nothing, I've got a tablecloth that covers an entire table.
But seriously folks, is this area/volume? Area/mass?
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However, try making three-dimensional porous structure out of it!
'k. brb.
Is it sticky? (Score:3)
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The surface area is mostly holes running through each 'grain' of this stuff, so you can't put it up against another surface to do that trick.
nearing SA of Gabriel's horn? (Score:1)
Yeah!!! (Score:2)
Doing sh*t because we can! Now scientists will spend 100 years trying to figure out what to do with these crystals. Will end up in iPhone50 S.
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Police Box (Score:1)
What would happen if I grew a Police Box out of these crystals?
Paraphrasing Steven Wright... (Score:1)
It's a small grain of NU-110, but I wouldn't want to paint it.
This may be slightly pedantic, but... (Score:2)
Should they not be talking about the greatest _ratio_ of surface area to volume? The Earth itself, for example, has a pretty great amount of surface area.
NU-110 + 2l bottle of Coke? (Score:2)
So what happens when you drop a grain of it into a bottle of Coke...