I want a ballon made of Graphene. Not only would it be super strong, graphene has such a tight structure that even hydrogen can’t penetrate. Why is that important? Because the helium would never leak out!
A never shrinking balloon! Genius!
What mundane items would you make with super materials?
I’d want an aerogel sleeping pad!
And, of course, some sort of plasma lightsaber. Yum.
Nevermind, those pads already exist 
Teeth coated in synthetic diamond so they don’t wear out ?
(stolen from David Brin )
OK, it’s not a brand new supermaterial, but I delight in owning a titanium crowbar. It’s light, strong and wont rust or corrode in a wet or even marine environment.
Cost me about $30 plus shipping a few years back. I see they’re up to $40 now, but thats highly reasonable for a lifetime tool that works beautifully
Memory Wire is used to animate various items on model railroad layouts, such as crossing gates or semaphores.
Actually model railroading tends to be on the cutting edge of technology, always searching for the smallest LED (for colored model lights in signals, locomotive headlamps), the most loss-less fiber optics (for superior light pipes), the most advanced adhesives (to glue varied dissimilar materials such as wood, cast metal, glass, and plastics (including engineering plastics) together, forming a tight, strong, very long lasting bond), the most advanced paints to produce the smoothest, durable, colorfast finishes, the latest building materials & techniques to form lightweight but strong benchwork - and we won’t even get into DCC.
I predict Model railroader will in a few years (if they haven’t started already) be investigating bio-engineering to generate miniature live scale trees, bushes, and grasses, which then can be preserved for layout use - OLED displays (or some equivalent) are being used to animate backgrounds scenes already I think.
I hope you’d wash them before you put them in your mouth.
I want those, too. Also a watch with diamond instead of glass over it, and glasses with diamond lenses, so my watch and glasses couldn’t get scratched.
That aerogel is freaking awesome!
I would love a bathroom with an outside wall made of it, that vague blue translucency would be fantastic decoratively speaking, and not losing the heat in the winter would be great…
Once in Vancouver I encountered a potato chip bag that was made out of debris from the Roswell UFO:
Extremely lightweight “metal” (shiny and reflective) that was very flexible.
Impossible to puncture with a knife (we tried!).
Could only be torn along the seams. The material itself would not tear for love nor money.
The material was opaque but you could still see through it up close.
It had other mysterious/miraculous properties that were apparent to us at the time but are now lost in the mists of memory. But the most amazing thing was that this material had come all the way from Area 51 to protect plain potato chips. It’s a conspiracy so vast I don’t even want to think about it.
It is used in some windows, but only between glass. Air goes right through aerogel, so in and of itself, it would make a poor insulator.
Come to think of it, aerogel is fragile as all hell too, so it wouldn’t make a good wall at all.
I’ll be damned, the wiki says they eliminate convection because the air can’t get through the glass. This contradicts my observation, but maybe I missunderstood what I was seeing. I haven’t seen one in ten years. I really thought they were gas permeable.
I know they have some structural stability, but they aren’t really structural materials. I guarantee they took lots of time placing that brick on that aerogel in the wiki. Quite literaly, it breaks apart with only a slight touch. Notice the way everybody is holding it. I broke it myself by gripping it too hard.
I should point out that Home Depot scanners are covered with artificial sapphire, so dragging tools over them doesn’t shatter the glass. The technique is spreading…
That’s a monitor covered with the same material… being tested the hard way. With a crossbow.
What does it feel like? Is it soft and fluffy like cotton candy? Bouncy like jello? Rough and abrasive like pumice?
If you drop it, does it slowly float down like a balloon?
Oh hell yeah. The iPhone needs some of that!
And arbalest, my friend, arbalest. 'tis no mere crossbow of the ordinary sort.
At least that’s what the Youtube poster called it. I don’t actually know the difference.
but between glass is fine with me, and you can have nonstructural glass walls, we see it in buildings all the time. I dont need it to be loadbearing, just a cool blue translucence=) and not let me freeze my ass off in the winter!
It is not bouncy. It is hard and rigid. If you drop it it will drop like a piece of plastic and hit hard. Droping it from a low three feet would likely damage it, but it won’t shatter like glass. You will just crush some corners. It’s texture is like that magic tape that looks frosty but disappears when you tape a present. It’s not smooth like glossy, but it is smooth. It is extremey light. It feels fragile and it is. You could probably punch a hole through several inches of it. On the other hand, it can support weight, but I’m guessing it’s kind of like a bed of nails where the weight needs to be spread out evenly.
Anyway, it seems I was wrong about it being permeable. The set up I saw had a round aerogel plug in it and when you turned it upside down the plug would very slowly fall to the other side. I thought that the air was slowly going through the aerogel, but it must have been going around the outside.
Here is a video of aerogel. That particular sample looks considerably sturdier than the sample I handled. I crushed in the corner of the sample I handled with my finger. It’s possible that I had a particularly light sample. No doubt there is considerable variability in aerogels depending on the method of synthesis. I thought I remember that it kind of squeaked when you rub it, but I can’t find any evidence of that.
Here is a sample that is more like what I handled. It looks like it is stronger than I thought, but you can see he easily breaks it. Here is a pretty cool aerogel. The stuff I handled wasn’t that fragile.
Graphene is not all that difficult to obtain. Downstairs from my lab, they get it via what is apparently called the “scotch tape method”:
Voila! You have a layer of graphene on your scotch tape.
I have literally hundreds of pounds of miraculous materials that are stronger but lighter than steel!
…oh wait, I work in the composites industry. I guess that’s not a big deal.
An arbalest is a heavy crossbow with a steel bow. But he was cocking the thing just by pulling the bowstring back with his fingers, so it wouldn’t really compare with an authentic medieval arbalest which would require a windlass to load.