German material scientists from Kiel University and the Hamburg University of Technology have created the world’s lightest material, dubbed aerographite. One cubic centimeter of aerographite weighs just 0.2 milligrams, which is four times lighter than the previous record holder, 5,000 times less dense than water, and six times lighter than air.

Aerographite, as you can see from the picture above, is a mesh of carbon tubes, each around 15nm in diameter, interwoven at the micro- and nano-scale level. It is electrically conductive, ductile, jet black (non-transparent), and can withstand high compression and tensile loads. Aerographite can be compressed to a 30th of its original size, gaining extra strength and conductivity in the process, and spring back without any damage to its structure — or it can carry up to 40,000 times its own weight.

“Think of the aerographite as an ivy-web, which winds itself around a tree. And then take away the tree”, says Rainer Adelung, a professor at Kiel University. The “trees” in this case are zinc oxide crystals, which are shaped like four-sided jacks/knucklebones (pictured below). The crystals are then placed in an oven and coated with a layer of carbon using chemical vapor deposition (CVD). At the same time, hydrogen gas is added to the oven, which steals the oxygen away from the zinc oxide. The zinc falls to the floor of the oven, leaving just the outer skeleton of carbon — aerographite.

As for use cases, there are three likely candidates: Batteries, wearable computing, and filtration. Because of its lightness and relatively large surface area, aerographite could enable the creation of much lighter lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors. Non-conductive objects, such as plastics, could be coated with aerographite to make them conductive — without gaining weight. Just as carbon is already used to filter water, aerographite might excel at both water and air filtration. The scientists report that by changing the process — the temperature of the oven, how quickly the hydrogen is added — the structure of aerographite can be modified, perhaps to tailor it for each use-case.

As an interesting aside, aerographite is also superhydrophobic — so as long as you’re a fan of black, it might be a good way of making your clothes waterproof.

Curiously, while researching this story, I came across Aerogel.org, a site that specializes in recipes for creating substances such as aerographite. On the aerographite page the editors note that the recipe is a “beta” as they haven’t actually tried it out yet. The instructions and requisite reagents seem fairly easy to come by, though, if you want to give it a try.

Now read: Hype-kill: Graphene is awesome, but a very long way from replacing silicon

Read more at Kiel University, or the research paper DOI: 10.1002/adma.201200491