Transparent Aluminum - Star Trek 4 comes home?

Pretty cool yeah, but requires a lot of repetetive action to achieve even a small amount of the material...but yeah, I can see it being used as impact resistant material for windows and visors...Either as a coating on a regular 'viewing surface' or as being the viewing surface itself...

But just HOW 'transparent' is this material? Transparent, after all, can mean either clear, like regular glass windows, or just clear enough to allow light through it...

I imagine it is more like the latter (glass) than the former...but how much so?

Actually, tallteen, you are confusing two dissimilar terms. Transparent means that one can see through a material clearly. Translucent means that light is permitted but not clear vision.

Ah, my mistake, I guess I wasn't really thinking clearly...

Lol, I even got my 'latter's and 'former's wrong, as you can see ;; It was supposed to be the other way around (it being more like glass, than simply allowing some light through)...

This is one of the many different things that are possible in the "nano" world. Hell i heard awhile back that they were working on hunter killers to hunt down diseases and so forth. But they were not too far along with it.

Wolfe, I am not familiar with the specific research of which you speak but I have a friend who works in cancer research who has been doing something similar with destroying cancer from the inside. Essentially, she has been looking into the difference in the biochemistry of the cancer cells and developing a compound (based on gold, if I remember correctly) that is attracted to and absorbed into the cancerous cells. Then what is done is that the body is given a small dose of infrared radiation. The compound heats the cells faster than the normal cells and kills them by rupturing them. The body then sloughs them out of the system as it does with all dead cells. :-)

(Note: I may have some of the details wrong since it has been a few years since Lorrayne told me about this but the basic concept is correct.)

Assuming that they are moving forward with this prospect, it seems logical to me that nanotechnology would be the appropriate next generation: progress from simple non-functional compounds to something that can be more easily directed. I am hopeful for what this research will bring.

that sounds awesome but as tallteen86 said how transparent is it, i wish a picture was included in this artilce and something like this could really chang things in the world like new car windsheild that don't break or composite materials for plane who knows but cool none the less

Pheonixfire, as I pointed out earlier, there is a difference between transparent and translucent. Transparent, as I explained above, means that visible light is transmitted without distortion and that vision is clear. Translucent means that visible light is transmitted through the medium but that the vision is obscured or blocked completely. Opaque, just to throw in the third and final option, means that no visible light gets through and vision is completely blocked.

This research was conducted at the University of Michigan's College of Engineering, which is ranked as one of the top engineering schools in the country. It was the University of Michigan themselves who wrote and published the article that was the source for this article. Given that it was professional engineers who used the term "transparent," it would be reasonable to assume that they know how to properly use the term to explain a phenomenon that they are describing.