A remarkable outcome has come from the research of scientists at UC Irvine in California; the lightest material in the world being created. Just to scale its development into something you can somewhat compare, it is about 100 times lighter than Styrofoam.

Simply take a look at the image above and you’ll see just how light the material is as it can comfortably rest on a dandelion without disrupting its surface.

The new material is said to be designed with the architectural concept of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, but at an extremely small scale. The scientists stated that those two internationally recognized structures are much more than just a pretty sight and that they are also structural masterpieces in the way they’ve been built. The manager of the architectural material they used to create it stated that, at a large scale, the two structures are incredibly light and weight-efficient give how high, wide, etc. they are.

New Material Can Impact Structure Of Airplane and Car

The new material emulates these structures on a nano and microscale and it consists mainly of 99.9% air and just 0.01 percent solid..imagine that!

The scientists at UC Irvine were able to use a method that involves a very innovative “fabric-like” material that interconnects nanoscale tubes with a thickness of 100 nanometers, which is roughly 1000 times thinner than a human hair (yes, thinner). The lighter-than-anything there ever was material created quite a bit of buzz in the scientific community as it displayed unprecedented behavior for a metal.

After reading all this, you’re probably wondering how this material could potentially be used in the real world. Well, the researchers claim that such a light material could be used for such things as battery electrodes and acoustics, vehicle suspensions and aircraft landing gear.