I Waterproofed Myself With Aerogel!

Aerogel has extraordinary properties but it can be tough to work with. This video looks at modifying aerogels to take advantage of their unique characteristics. Subscribe to Veritasium: Huge thanks to Dr. Stephen Steiner and the crew at Aerogel Technologies. To find out more or buy your own aerogel sample, check out: Thanks to Dr. Steven Jones and Dr. Mihail Petkov at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory And thanks to FLIR for loaning us the awesome high definition thermal camera. The footage is amazing! Aerogel’s extraordinary properties are due in large part to its structure. Aerogel is a solid but on the nanoscale it has a mesh or sponge-like structure. The struts of this structure are nanoscale, as are the pores at around 20nm across. This makes silica aerogel incredibly light (it was once the lightest solid but has now been superseded by graphene aerogel), transparent and adsorbent. An ice-cube sized piece of aerogel has an in