Concrete may have found it's killer app in graphene aerogel material, which is a highly efficient insulator thanks to its atomic scale thinness and flexibility. The aerogel could be used in clothing, body armor, and fuel cell electrodes. The idea of aerogel goes back to a German scientist who hypothesized that a type of aerogel would be possible back in 1922 and that such aerogel could be superinsulated and superstrong. Then in 1998, an aerogel was produced that was superinsulated to the point where its thermal conductivity was so low that it required liquid nitrogen to chill it to 1 kelvin. This led to the aerogel being dubbed a "frozen smoke" and this new type of ultralight insulating material was also known as a "solid smoke". However, aerogel does not insulate because of its solid core, but because of a super porous foam core that allows the foam to capture and dissipate thermal energy and slow down the transfer of heat from one side to another. This works because aerogel is just a porous structure, so light itself is not "captured" in the air pockets, but heat is. Even more interesting was the application of this aerogel to an area that would never occur to one as being a good home for aerogel - graphene aerogel. Graphene is superlight, flexible, and conductive and has amazing electrical properties that could potentially make graphene aerogel an excellent conductor, but there was the problem of "air pockets" trapped in the holes of the aerogel. So aerogel was made with just 10% graphene and 90% air. This improved the aerogel's conductivity by a factor of 10 million. The key to graphene's conductivity is to have conductive electrons move freely within the foam like the conductors in the aerogel. The conductivity increases as the amount of graphene is increased. It's just that for graphene, the conductive electrons need to be able to move without having to jump over atoms in order to travel from one side of the foam to the other. With graphene aerogel, the insulative aerogel's air pockets become conductive. The aerogel could be used as a superinsulated clothing, body armor, and fuel cell electrodes. Even though this is a revolutionary material that could see new applications, it is not yet that useful as it is more insulative than the porous insulation used in many buildings. However, the aerogel could be used as a lightweight, flexible and transparent electrode. We have also not seen aerogel being used in military applications yet, but when you consider that the US military is the biggest consumer of thermal-protective clothing you start to wonder how it's possible that the military has not already been developing aerogel material for use in military clothing. The research was published in Advanced Functional Materials. Now read: University of Massachusetts scientists created a magnetic artificial muscle material that can repair itself in 2 hours and withstand 10,000 times more tension Research paper: Graphene Aerogel as A Conducting Matrix for Efficient Charge Transport Research paper: Ultralightweight and flexible graphene aerogel as a transparent conductive electrode and optical functional supercapacitor with high capacitance density Research paper: An ultrasoft, ultrasensitive capacitive tactile sensor based on high specific surface area polyaniline-graphene oxide hybrid aerogel film Research paper: Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting and Storage in Graphene Materials Research paper: Superinsulation and Conducting Thermal Radiation in Structurally Dense Carbon Aerogels