Aluminum

When it comes to high-end, high-performance bicycles, most people look to materials like carbon fiber and titanium. Thanks to a technique utilized in the building of the Hypocrite gravel bike, however, aluminum can also fit the bill quite nicely.

The Draft Top is designed to take your beer can (and other drinks) to a new level. It cleanly and smoothly removes the lid from an aluminum vessel, allowing for better taste, less bloat, imaginative creations and, afterwards, some clever repurposing.

Astronomers have discovered the cosmic equivalent of a parent crashing a teenagers’ party to make sure they have enough water. An aging star has been detected passing through a young star-forming region, delivering elements crucial for life to form.

Radioactive isotopes found in meteorites suggest a supernova went off right near the Sun as it was forming – but that should have blasted the young solar system away. So how did we survive? A new study proposes an explanation.

Although electric typewriters have been made almost entirely obsolete, there's something to be said for the satisfying "clickety-clack" of their keys. Well, that sound and feel is back, in the all-aluminum Fineday 3.0 Bluetooth Mechanical Keyboard.

For the mass-production of mountain bikes, welded aluminum frames make a lot of sense. The Psalm 150 full-suspension frame is designed with a different philosophy in mind, however, as it's made of bonded sections of CNC-machined solid aluminum.

Touring kayaks are typically made of plastic, composites or sometimes wood, but unlike canoes, almost never aluminum. That didn't faze Brennen Kunka, however, who recently built his own all-aluminum kayak from the ground up – and it's awesome!

NEXSD looks to improve the quality of motorhomes with an aluminum construction lighter than a panel van but as spacious as a motorhome. Its "One" prototype is a moto-hauling B+ 4-sleeper ready to spend days or weeks living comfortably off-grid.

“We don’t need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said UCSC Professor Scott Oliver, describing a new aluminum-gallium nanoparticle powder that generates H2 when placed in water – even seawater.

A new battery from MIT uses common materials – aluminum, sulfur and salt. Not only is the battery low-cost, but it’s resistant to fire and failures, and can be charged very fast, making it useful for powering a home or charging electric vehicles.

Aluminum has an energy density more than 50 times higher than lithium ion, if you treat it as an energy storage medium in a clean redox cycle system. Swiss scientists are developing the technology as a renewable energy stash for the European winter.

It’s an unfortunate truth that many important chemical reactions require rare and expensive metals as catalysts. But now, scientists have developed a device that actively tweaks plain old aluminum to make it behave like other metals on the fly.