A library of the world's most unusual compounds

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

George Pendle has done a nice write-up of the Materials Library at King's College London for the Finanical Times. It's a place I badly want to visit on my next trip to London:

Deep in the bowels of a brutalist concrete building on the Strand, long shelves are packed - crammed, really - with some of the world's strangest substances, from the past, present and sometimes, it seems, the future. Take Aerogel: the world's lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice. Nearby are panes of glass that clean themselves, metal that remembers the last shape it was twisted into, and a thin tube of Tin Stick which, when bent, emits a sound like a human cry. There's a tub of totally inert fluorocarbon liquid into which any electronic device can be placed and continue to function. The same liquid has been used to replace the blood in lab rats, which also, oddly enough, continue to function... All these, and more than 900 others, including everyday materials suchas aluminium, steel and copper, are here for one purpose - to instil a sense of wonder in the visitor.

A Library of the World's Most Unusual Compounds

[#1 posted by zikman, June 23, 2009 11:05 AM]

aerogel! I forgot about that stuff

[#2 posted by zikman, June 23, 2009 11:11 AM]

aerogel! I forgot about that stuff

[#3 posted by Sekino, June 23, 2009 11:17 AM]

That is so awesome! It sounds like Willy Wonka's factory... except with cool geeky substances instead of candy! Definitely a place worth visiting.

[#4 posted by laderoda, June 23, 2009 12:11 PM]

I hope it includes that clear plastic used to package things like USB thumb drives and razor blades. That has to be the closest thing to an indestructible material ever made, and the most dangerous when you do get it cut (I have a scar at the base of one thumb, resulting from a cut I got from a partly-opened package of head-phones made of this stuff).

[#5 posted by 3.14chan, June 23, 2009 1:10 PM]

#3
What I need buy to get a golden ticket?

[#6 posted by Bugs, June 23, 2009 1:45 PM]

Wow, this place sounds amazing. I've just signed up to their mailing list, and will write to try and blag a visit when I have some free time...

[#7 posted by Gilbert Wham, June 23, 2009 2:34 PM]

Look, you're an awesome guest blogger and all, but I have shit to do/. How am I expected to get it done with all this stuff to look at, eh? Eh?

[#8 posted by IWood, June 23, 2009 2:46 PM]

My material changes shape when you shout at it! ARRGH! AAAGH! Would you look at that!? Lovely.

[#9 posted by IWood, June 23, 2009 2:50 PM]

Also!

Newcomers [to Material ConneXion's library] include Fabrican, tiny fibres suspended in an aerosol solution that can be sprayed directly on to the skin to form instant garments;

I give you: Amy Wong's spray-on bikini.

[#10 posted by Man On Pink Corner, June 23, 2009 9:32 PM]

No tert-butyl lithium? Boring

[#11 posted by MrScience, July 14, 2009 10:24 AM]

#4, I once broke a pair of scissors trying to open that kind of plastic packaging. Brutal stuff!