The researchers say the viral claims are false.
Everyone’s experienced that seemingly slow-motion, heart-dropping moment when your phone slips out of your hand and hits the ground. Face down. Do you even want to pick it up and see the possible damage? A cracked screen is no fun, and a pretty expensive accident at that.
You may have seen articles splashed throughout the internet over the past few days claiming that researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan just created the solution to every iPhone owner’s nightmare: “unbreakable” glass that’s “nearly as hard as steel” and could make smartphone screens uncrackable.
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However, before prancing around with hopes that researchers just solved your smartphone problems, you should know that the glass is definitely not quite there. These rumors are whizzing around the Internet, but in an email to Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff, Atsunobu Masuno of the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science cleared up the confusion.
"Our glass is not unbreakable but ultra-hard," Masuno wrote. “Unbreakable and hard are totally different. Our press release document in Japanese did not use the term 'unbreakable.'"
In response to the claims that the new glass is as hard as steel, Masuno disarmed the rumor by saying the new super glass material is “comparable to cast iron, not steel.”
You’d think that even a glass material as hard as cast iron might lead to an uncrackable iPhone screen, but sadly, Masuno told Ulanoff, “We don't think that our new glass may one day prevent cell phone screens from cracking." Cue the heartbreaks of smartphone owners around the world.
But the reality behind the Japanese researchers’ new super glass is still pretty compelling. Plus, their completely original technique of creating the glass sounds like something that would happen in a futuristic lab in a sci-fi novel.
The new super glass is double the strength of conventional glass. The secret ingredient? Alumina.
Popular Science reports that alumina is an oxidized version of aluminum — an element that happens to possess some of the strongest chemical bonds on Earth. However, putting alumina in glass was no simple task. During the scientists’ first attempts, cloudy crystals of silicon dioxide formed on the glass against the surface of the mould, rendering it no longer transparent.
However, the scientists developed their own method called aerodynamic levitation to solve the problem. It sounds like some kind of crazy sci-fi flying trick, but really it just involved the glass being formed in mid-air — OK, still pretty cool…
As the glass and alumina mixture formed in the air, the scientists pumped oxygen gas between the mixture and the surfaces of the container. Then, they used a laser to mix it as it cooled, resulting in a material that contains more alumina than other other glass yet created. Plus, the glass was transparent, reflective, and super strong.
While the super glass is an exciting advancement, the researchers must continue to develop it and improve the material for it to one day be “unbreakable” — and Masuno did say that was their “next target.”
But first, they have to figure out how to use the super hard glass crystals to develop larger sheets of glass. Then, they hope to potentially produce super-strong glasses, and who knows? Maybe even one day we’ll be graced with unbreakable smartphone screens.
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