Swedish scientists do the impossible by accident

IT IS SO difficult to make that the researchers who first discovered it called it the “impossible material”.

Now a century later, a team of Swedish scientists has done the impossible by producing the substance by accident – after leaving their equipment running over the weekend.

The breakthrough has farreaching applications, as Upsalite (named after the University of Uppsala, where the Swedish team is based) is the world’s most efficient water absorber, with potential to be used for the removal of moisture in drug creation and hightech electronics, to cleaning up huge oil spills.

Other uses include ice hockey rinks, warehouses, the collection of toxic waste spills and odour control.

A single gram of this powdered form of magnesium car- bonate (MgCO3) has an extraordinarily large surface area of 800m 2 thanks to numerous minuscule pores, each one a million times smaller than the width of a human hair.

“Upsalite absorbs more water and low relative humidities than the best materials presently available, and can be regenerated with less energy consumption than is used in similar processes today,” said Maria Stromme, professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University. This, together with other unique properties of the discovered impossible material, is expected to pave the way for new sustainable products in a number of industrial applications,” she said.

MgCO3 is about as dry as a material can get, a property which, combined with a huge relative surface area inundated with pocket pores, makes it the world’s best mop. The only problem is that, until now, this absorbent form of magnesium carbonate could only be produced by a process that is so expensive and involves so much heat that it wasn’t remotely feasible to use it.

Although the Uppsala team had been trying to create the impossible material, they had been going about it the wrong way.

“A Thursday afternoon in 2011, we slightly changed the synthesis parameters of the earlier employed unsuccessful attempts, and by mistake left the material in the reaction chamber over the weekend. Back at work on Monday morning we discovered that a rigid gel had formed and after drying this gel we started to get excited,” says Johan Gomez de la Torre.