Scientists Created New Material By Accident
WONDER MATERIAL – ‘Phosphorene Nanoribbons’ – a new material than can potentially spur technological developments – made by accident.
Accident happen. Sometimes it’s terrible, but sometimes it’s a good thing. Especially in scientific discoveries.
A lot of discoveries that are still useful to this day were made by accident. In fact, cornflakes, Teflon, slinky, silly putty, post-it notes and popsicles are all discovered by accident!
Recently, scientists have been trying to split phosphorous crystals’ layers into 2D sheets.
In their attempt, they instead created tiny ribbons that measures only 1 atom thick, around 100 atoms wide and stretches to about 100,000 atoms long.
This is based on an article from MSN. Based on the article,
The newly created tiny ribbons have various properties. The material has the same length and width proportion to the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Its malleable width allows some of its properties to be ‘finely tuned’. The material is also very flexible, it can even be twisted.
Scientists claim that there is a wide range of technological application for these nanoribbons.
Some technological application for the material is the use of its features to improve battery technology. With its features to batteries, charged ions – the source of batteries’ powers – can move up to a thousand times faster.
This means, faster charging and bigger power capacity for batteries. These applications could further enhance electric cars and aircrafts.
The material is now being studied for mass production.
However, production of these materials isn’t the only step to technological change. The material still has to undergo tests and researches should be carried to probe other possible applications.
That is all there is to it, at least for now. We’ll post updates as soon as we got them.