Worlds lightest Material Balance on A Cherry Blossom

Created in 2013 by a research team from China’s Zhejiang University, grapheme aerogel (featured atop a cherry blossom in the photo above) is considered the world’s lightest material — so much so that it is seven times lighter than air.

That’s not to say it’s incredibly fragile or useless: the material can recover completely after more than 90 percent compression, and absorb up to 900 times its own weight in oil at a rate of 68.8 grams per second. In fact, it’s these properties that has led researcher Gao Chao to hope that the material can be used to mop up oil spills, squeezed to reclaim the oil, and then thrown back in the ocean to mop up more oil, Extreme Tech reported.