Microscopic soot makes rubber strong enough for airplanes
Inventions
Deep inside your car tires, hundreds of thousands of carbon atoms form a skeletal lattice that prevents soft rubber from shredding under the weight of a landing jet.
For over a century, engineers knew that mixing soot into rubber made it exponentially tougher, but they couldn't explain why. Without this black powder, the rubber on a Boeing 747 would be as fragile as a pencil eraser, disintegrating the moment it touched the runway. Researchers at the University of South Florida recently used massive computer simulations to model 100,000 individual atoms, finally revealing the secret: the carbon doesn't just sit there like sand in a bucket.