By Anupum Pant
If you rely on and make your judgement on just the editorial titles being passed around on the internet, then you got to look more carefully. A few days back, when a few researchers from Denmark announced that they had developed a material, a tiny volume of which could store huge amounts of oxygen, the whole internet saw a headline floating around that said something like:
A new material, just a spoonful of which can suck up oxygen of the whole room.
That sounds like a material which every serial killer on the planet would be waiting to get their hands on. However, the real story is quite different, from what the headlines make it look. Which is also not to say that the invention is any less remarkable.
Think about it like this – A single spoonful of this material (more like a bucket actually) sure has enough space to store the amount of oxygen that normally is available in a single room. But, unlike what headlines tell you, it can’t spontaneously pull all the oxygen from the whole room in a few seconds.
Since a tiny volume of it can hold so much oxygen, this new material, made by tinkering of the structure of cobalt, will probably, in the near future, be a boon for patients who have to lug around heavy tanks of oxygen with them. Deep sea divers will benefit from it too, not serial killers. The video explains.