- [Narrator] Nano and smart
materials are all the rage and material scientists have
been rubbing their hands at the new breeds of amazing materials they've been able to create recently. Of course, these materials only seem to defy the laws of physics, rather than break or violate them, because obviously we can only ever create anything within the laws of physics. But some have genuinely changed the way we think about
the physics of materials and their properties. (whimsical music) Number 10, terminator polymer. Cut this polymer with a razor blade and it will glue itself back
together in a matter of hours. Okay, so it doesn't exactly
move back into form on its own, you have to push the pieces together. But still, give it a while and it'll feel like it's never been cut. Dubbed the terminator polymer, this crazy material is aptly named after the self-healing material seen in the Terminator movies. Material designers have
always sought a strong, hard, and versatile material, which
can fix itself on its own. But before this material was created, self-healing plastics
would need a stimulus in order to instigate the healing process. For example, certain plastics
would repair themselves when heat is applied to them. Contrastingly, this plastic
self-heals at room temperature and does spontaneously
with 97% efficiency, meaning 97% of severed
bonds will actually repair. This is achievable through
the use of aromatic disulfides which react and bond
and normal temperatures. Number nine hydrophobic materials. You may have used
waterproof spray on a tent or on your shoes or boots, but then, when it really bucketed down, it tends to fail pretty quickly. Creating waterproof
sprays is no easy task, but it's a lucrative business. NeverWet has made the first
stab at dominating this market. With a super hydrophobic sprayable coating that can waterproof almost anything to a depth of a few foot. Not only can it waterproof
all manner of items, it also protects them against corrosion and is functional under
extreme heat or cold. NeverWet adheres to almost anything, and it's widely available for a whole host of industrial and practical applications. Another liquid problem
solved with smart materials is getting those drips and drabs out of a sauce bottle. Scraping the inside of a glass bottle or container for the very last drips is frustrating and wasteful. The solution? Coat the inside of the bottle with a smart frictionless material that allows the contents
to just slide out freely. These liquids could also
reduce friction in oil, water, or gas pipes to prevent clogging. The only downside is that you might end up emptying half a pot of
mayo onto your dinner. Number eight, gallium. Gallium is one of only four metals which are present as liquids at temperatures near room temperature. The others are mercury,
rubidium, and cesium and their most familiar
use is in thermometers. Gallium is a beautiful metal. It's soft and silvery
and has a melting point of just 29.8 degrees Celsius, meaning it will easily melt in your hand. It boils at 2,229 degrees
Celsius, which is quite high. There's a massive gap between its melting and boiling points. When contrastingly mercury boils at just 356.7 degrees Celsius. Unlike mercury, gallium is perfectly safe, meaning you can handle it without worry. This also means it's occasionally used as a replacement for mercury
in medical thermometers. Gallium is also alloyed with other metals to create brilliantly bright mirrors. It just goes to show
that even the elements of the periodic table have seemingly strange properties on their own. Number seven, smart bendable wood. Wood will always be a
premier building material due to it's beautiful aesthetic
qualities and versatility. Generally wood is rigid, but now bendable wood allows
us to flex wooden structures into spaces to create stunning
interiors which are durable and possess extraordinary
sound absorption properties. Dukta is one such company, pioneering bendable wood
which possess strength with amazing flexibility. Because of dukta's density
combined with it's layered form it's an awesome heat and sound insulator. This wood is manufactured from either particulated wood blends that
are mixed with flexible glues or from carefully adhering
flexible wood sheets in patterns which allow for flexibility. Number six, vantablack. Have you ever considered how some blacks look much, much darker than others. One of the darkest places on Earth, might be inside a deep cave, but now we can view super dark blacks, above the Earth's surface. The blackness of a color is determined by how much light it absorbs and thus how little
reflects back into our eye. The more light absorbed
by a colored surface, the darker it will be. Even very deep blacks reflect some light, though, and it's theorized
that a black hole is one of the only objects in the universe that lacks any light at all. Obviously the darkness of a black hole isn't readily observable, but Vantablack gets pretty close. Vantablack is a black so dark that it looks like how you would imagine a black hole would look. There is no reflection, no color, just nothing but darkness. Even on computer screens
it looks rather strange. Much darker than the blacks
we're used to seeing. This black is made from
very densely packed carbon nanotubes and it absorbs a massive 99.96% of all visible light. The artist, Anish Kapoor,
famously seized exclusive rights to the original Vantablack color. But the recently created
Vantablack 2.0 is even darker. Number five, Line-X. Smart material and cans, it's a big theme in the 21st century and Line-X's spray paint offers a method of making
virtually any object far more durable, by simply
coating it in a spray. Once sprayed, Line-X forms long polymers which bind to the surface of the object, encasing it in a solid plastic. Line-X is used to prevent the splintering of plastic car parts, but can also be sprayed on other surfaces to help them absorb shock and prevent shattering and splintering. Line-X is used on the
walls at the Pentagon to reduce the chance of shrapnel
penetrating the building in the even of an attack. Line-X's ability to
strengthen fragile objects has been demonstrated with plastic cups that can withstand a human's
weight after being sprayed. Eggs coated in Line-X can even withstand drops from great heights. The uses of Line-X are pretty unlimited. Anything which is prone to shattering, cracking, or splintering is easily strengthened with Line-X and it's incredibly hard wearing,
and weatherproof to boot. Number four, super cooled rubidium. So here's a material which
really does seem to defy physics, specifically Newton's
second law of motion. Newton's second law says a force is equal to the mass of an object
multiplied by its acceleration. These forces are exhibited
in the direction you expect. So for example when you push a door, it opens outwards in front of you. Super cooled rubidium,
created by cooling rubidium to near absolute zero,
reverses Newton's second law. When you exhibit a force
on super cooled rubidium, it seems to actually
push the opposite way. The physicists themselves were baffled. "It's very counterintuitive and weird" said John Butterworth and UCL London. Others suggest that the analogies some used to describe
this effect is a bit off. While super cooled,
rubidium does seem to behave like a material with negative mass. The atoms don't literally
weigh less than zero. Number three, hydrogels. Some advanced hydrogels are
mechanical metamaterials which flowed like liquids, meaning they can be poured into cavities. It then solidifies whilst
remaining highly absorbent. The primary use of hydrogel is medicine. Hydrogels can be inserted into wounds and then drugs can be absorbed into them. Some hydrogels are made
from long-strand polymers, but the very last have been
created organically from DNA. One highlighted potential use of hydrogels is to deliver drugs to areas
where tumors have been removed but cancer cells remain in
the surrounding tissues. Hydrogels would conform to the cavity and anti-cancer drugs could be delivered to surrounding, specifically
affected tissues. Number two, starlite. Starlite is by far the
most mysterious material on this list. Firstly, it wasn't
produced by any scientist, but instead by an amateur
inventor named Maurice Ward who was a forklift driver
and ladies hairdresser from Blackburn, UK. Ward claimed to have invented
a remarkable material that could insulate anything
from extremely high heats. In fact, some tests claim that starlite could withstand temperatures
of over 10,000 degrees Celsius. Ward essentially cooked
this up in his own house and used it in his hairdressing business before realizing quite
how effective it was. After mailing top chemical companies with request to demonstrate the product, he was finally invited onto
the BBC science program, Tomorrow's World in the 1970s. The inventor famously
blow torched a raw egg for an amazing five
minutes at 1,500 degrees, before demonstrating that it remained completely raw inside when cracked. Ward's material finally
attracted attention and even the NASA spokesperson at the time seemingly verified the
authenticity of starlite. "We have done lot of
evaluation and we know "all the tremendous possibilities
that this material has." Ward had achieved something that decades of intense research could
not and his material would be incredibly
useful in many industries. Rumors suggest that starlite went black, meaning it is safeguarded by governments to prevent it from being replicated. Starlite is so resistant to heat that it could safeguard
objects from nuclear blasts. The truth is, starlite
and its current status is still a bit of a mystery. Number one, aerogel and SF6 gas. When aerogels were first
developed in the 1960s, they were seemingly strikingly defiant of traditional material physics, with extremely low densities and extremely low thermal conductivity. They are porous materials that were nicknamed frozen smoke due to their rather ghostly appearance. Aerogel is more of a foam than a solid, but it's still capable
of holding 3D shapes, despite it's remarkably low density. 150 brick sized blocks of aerogel will only way as much
as a gallon of water. The coolest property of aerogel is its heat insulating properties. Experiments show how even
a small sheet of aerogel can insulate something
delicate like a flower from the heat of a flame. Aerogel has been employed
by space agencies like NASA as a super light insulator. It can be packed into spacesuits, or used as cavity
insulation for spacecraft. Sulfur hexafluoride on the other hand has a rather contrasting characteristic of being very dense for a gas. About five time denser than air, it's nontoxic and inert meaning
it can be employed freely as a gas insulator for electronics. This also means you can safely
breath it from a balloon to observe the super
low pitch of your voice created by the gases high density. - Sulfur hexafluoride. - [Narrator] Smart materials
that open new avenues for scientific understanding
and practical applications and are constantly developing. There are probably many
highly advanced materials in research and development right now and many may yield fantastic
benefits for humanity. Which material did you
think was the coolest and more revolutionary. Let me know in the comments down below. Thanks for watching. (whimsical music)
