Researchers in Singapore and at CalTech have developed a 3D printed fabric with an interesting property: it is generally flexible but can stiffen on demand. You can see a video about the new fabric, below.

The material consists of nylon octahedrons interlocked. The cloth is enclosed in a plastic envelope and vacuum-packed. Once in a vacuum, the sheet becomes much stiffer and can hold many times its own weight.

Presumably, the idea would be to allow the material to flex in the plastic envelope until there was a need for the increased rigidity, and then remove the air. Of course, there are a lot of practical problems with that. If the envelope is no longer air tight, for example, the operation will fail. It is also hard to rapidly remove the air from the bag to make, say, something like Batman’s cape which was a comparison the researchers drew.

A team of researchers in northern China developed the world’s hardest glassy material, the transparent, yellow-tinted AM-III, which is capable of leaving a deep scratch on the surface of a diamond, a report from South China Morning Post explains.

The material, which is made entirely of carbon, reached a 113 gigapascals (GPa) on the Vickers hardness test. As a point of reference, natural diamonds usually score somewhere between 50 and 70 on the GPa scale.

The findings of the research, led by Professor Tian Yongjun of Yanshan University in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, were published in the journal National Science Review. In 2,013 Tian and his team created the world’s hardest material that’s visible to the naked eye, a boron nitride crystal that is twice as hard as diamond at 200 GPa.

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Scientists developed a material called AM-III which is tougher than diamond and is almost as efficient a semiconductor as silicon.

A freely moving diamond trapped inside another diamond was discovered in Siberia by Alrosa in 2019. The unusual diamond, nicknamed the “Matryoshka” after the traditional Russian nesting dolls, attracted widespread interest in how this feature formed The 0.62 ct flat octahedral diamond, a twinned macle, was recently examined by the New York laboratory. Flat-bottom trigon etch pits were well developed on the face {111} (figure 1). The crystal showed a clear green bodycolor, with small dark green radiation stains in shallow fractures along the edges when viewed from the top of the crystal. Two etch channels on opposite sides of the edges had rectangular openings about 0.2 mm in width. The channels extended into the internal enclosed cavity. These features made this diamond unique. Trapped in the cavity was a small, flat diamond crystal with a hexagonal outline. The small diamond, covered with some green radiation stains on the surface, is entirely detached from its host crystal and can move freely inside. The surface of the small diamond was covered with groups of straight parallel striations following the diamond crystal symmetry. No etched trigons were observed on the surfaces of the small diamond (figure 2). Except for tiny foreign-material contaminations at the two entrances of the open channels, no other inclusions were observed in this crystal (figure 3).