{"id":245034,"date":"2026-10-07T21:38:49","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T02:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/a-strange-new-material-breaks-the-usual-rules-of-heat-and-stiffness"},"modified":"2026-10-07T21:38:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T02:38:49","slug":"a-strange-new-material-breaks-the-usual-rules-of-heat-and-stiffness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/a-strange-new-material-breaks-the-usual-rules-of-heat-and-stiffness","title":{"rendered":"A Strange New Material Breaks the Usual Rules of Heat and Stiffness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-strange-new-material-breaks-the-usual-rules-of-heat-and-stiffness2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>A new material barely lets heat through yet is up to 10,000 times stiffer than the silicone used in oven mitts.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at <a href=\"https:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/tag\/north-carolina-state-university\/\">North Carolina State University<\/a> have engineered a thin film that combines exceptional stiffness with extreme thermal insulation. Its thermal conductivity ranks among the lowest reported for a dense, nonporous material, approaching the theoretical limit for how effectively such a material can block heat. The film can also be printed at large scales and applied as a coating.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cStiff materials that are good thermal insulators would have substantial utility in a variety of applications, from cookware to electronic devices to space travel,\u201d says Dali Sun, a physics professor at NC State and co-corresponding author of a journal article describing the work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new material barely lets heat through yet is up to 10,000 times stiffer than the silicone used in oven mitts. Researchers at North Carolina State University have engineered a thin film that combines exceptional stiffness with extreme thermal insulation. Its thermal conductivity ranks among the lowest reported for a dense, nonporous material, approaching the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}