NASA’s been messing with an ephemeral substance called Aerogel: 99.98% air, and virtually impervious to heat. The pictures seem almost impossible. They’ll be using it to grab interstellar particles moving 6x faster than a bullet without damaging them via either impact or heat.
Via Thornography.
Music: Brian Eno :: Shadow
Super-duper cool. I remember reading about aerogels in _Omni_ magazine years and years ago… they were invented in the 1930’s, according to the JPL page.. wow.
and are used in some pretty decent speaker drivers for the past decade or so i think.
I recently read a story about a female artist who has/had exclusive rights to use aerogel as a medium for creating art. I’m too lazy to look it up, which brings me to another point that laziness is relative.