Discoveries in materials science

01

Thermite

Once ignited, thermite burns at 2,500 °C — hot enough to melt through an engine block — and pouring water on it accelerates the reaction. The military uses it to destroy their own equipment.

02

Starlite

Maurice Ward, a hairdresser from Yorkshire, coated an egg in Starlite and held a blowtorch to it for five minutes — the egg stayed raw inside. He took its formula to his grave in 2011.

03

Gallium

Gallium melts at 29.8 °C — your palm is enough — then silently diffuses into aluminium alloys, unravelling their molecular structure until a wing strut crumbles. Aviation authorities ban it from aircraft cabins.

04

Pykrete

Pykrete — 14% sawdust locked in ice — stopped bullets in tests and barely melted. Project Habbakuk planned a 2-million-ton aircraft carrier made of it; a scale model was demonstrated to Churchill in a Quebec hotel bathtub.

05

Hydrogen embrittlement

Single hydrogen atoms — the smallest possible — squeeze between steel's iron lattice and make the metal brittle without leaving any visible trace. Bridge cables, surgical implants, and submarine hulls have failed this way.

06

Ferrofluid

Ferrofluid — iron nanoparticles suspended in oil — erupts into precise black spikes the instant a magnet approaches, each spike a tiny compass needle fighting surface tension. Remove the magnet and the spikes vanish instantly.

07

Spin ice

In dysprosium titanate crystals cooled near absolute zero, magnetic charges separate and move independently — behaving exactly like isolated north-only monopoles that physics said could not exist as free particles.

08

Buckminsterfullerene

Sixty carbon atoms arranged as a perfect truncated icosahedron — identical to a FIFA football — were discovered in 1985 by Harry Kroto inside the soot of a carbon arc, winning a Nobel Prize eleven years later.

09

Dilatant

Cornstarch stirred into water becomes a dilatant: press slowly and your finger sinks; punch it and the fluid hardens to concrete. BAE Systems built flexible armour panels from it that stop a knife in 8 milliseconds.

10

Aerogel

Aerogel is 99.8% air by volume, yet a thumbnail-sized block supports a 2.5 kg brick. NASA's Mars Pathfinder used it as insulation; the same material can be made from silica, carbon, or even frozen fruit juice.