Dive Brief:

• Don't go looking for them at your local building supplier anytime soon, but materials developed by researchers at a German university are lighter than water and stronger than steel, they report.
• The structures are too small for any practical use yet – about 10 micrometers long and used to build a structure that is about 50 micrometers wide – but new materials have to begin somewhere before a truckload arrives at a jobsite someday.
• Oliver Kraft of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology says the ceramic-polymer micro-materials did not break down until a pressure of 28 kilograms per square millimeter was reached, and they have a density of 810 kilograms per cubic meter.

Dive Insight:

The researchers said the stability-to-density ratio of the materials is higher than bones in the body and high-performance steel. At this point, they are made with lasers and ceramic applied as a gas. We will see if the research scales up someday.