New Glass Tops Steel in Strength and Toughness

Now that is interesting progress. It will mean an incredible change in the way we manufacture so many things when they come up with a way of mass production of this stuff.

If they can manage to make plate glass out of this windows will get very light.

I would be nice if they gave some numbers on how strong and tough it is.

With temperatures a bit nippy this morning, I hope the lighter version of the glass would still have good thermal insulation in the doulbe-pane configuration.

I wish they had included numbers too. In my work, we use glass as an insulator in applications where the glass has to be very strong (it's right next to an explosive and has to survive a blast without breaking/cracking so that pressure is not vented in the wrong direction). I'm guessing palladium is bad both for economy and electrical insulating properties, even if it is good for strength.

Could always laminate it onto other glass to create a truss type effect.

Sounds like it will be very expensive, but would be great if it is transparent. Would be a good thing for hurricane protection down here.

GA. This would seem like great news if palladium wasn't over $700 per ounce.

Palladium is closer to $800/ozt at this point, and there's silver in the mix as well. But I think they use very small amounts, proportionately, of elements other than silicon.

It's an interesting principle for making metallic glass, that you need 5 metals in the mix so the material doesn't know what crystal structure to form as it cools, and defaults to amorphous.

it's not invisible aluminium.......but better

Researchers at Oxford were able to make transparent aluminum using a soft X-ray laser. This article was published on the web in July of 2009:

http://www.physorg.com/news167925273.html

When I first saw the article I could not help but smile ear to ear , but I was a little let down by the fact that none of my coworkers picked up on the pop-culture reference when I told them about it. Oh well, guess that makes me chief nerd around here.