This sounds a bit like a paper-towel commercial, but scientists have come up with a new material that actually gets bigger and less dense when you
squeeze it.
If you think you can't get from the left one to the right one by squeezing, you might be wrongThe scientists spent years testing this out, just to be
sure they weren't all going through some shared delusion, but every test showed the same thing. When they applied pressure to zinc cyanide — mainly
used in electroplating — it didn't compact down and get more dense, like you'd expect something put under pressure to do. Instead, the material
completely rearranged itself, opening up into a more porous structure.
"It's like squeezing a stone and forming a giant sponge," said Karena Chapman, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, said in a
statement. "Materials are supposed to become denser and more compact under pressure. We are seeing the exact opposite."
This very strange, but very cool discovery will allow scientists to create a host of new porous materials, for anything from new water filters, carbon
dioxide traps and chemical sensors, to new ways of delivering drugs. |
