I wonder how easy their method is to scale up to centimeter...meter scale.

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> The Greer lab is now aggressively pursuing various ways of scaling up the production of these so-called meta-materials.

If they can figure it out, *that* would be the news. Because frankly there have been quite a few similar articles these days. They are all pretty much pointless until someone manages to produce samples on macroscopic scale.

The mention of lack of defects - if a defect is introduced to the ceramic under stress, does it fail catastrophically?

The reason why vacuum balloons don't exist today is due to the elasticity of the skin materials which are structually unstable when the envelope is made sufficiently big so as to displace enough air for static lift. So a flexible ceramic material is no way to go here, despite all the good work done on the neo-technology, this material would not find use for this particular application!

"So a flexible ceramic material is no way to go here, despite all the good work done on the neo-technology, this material would not find use for this particular application!"

Remember that these are nano-materials whose properties can be adjusted by the structure of how they are assembled. One can get a flexible membrane, or a stiff one of high strength, with different architectures in the nano scale structure. That means the general technology, which can be applied to metals, and perhaps carbon structures like diamond and graphene, is able to do what is needed, including a floating vacuum balloon.

With high enough strength/mass ratios in a sealed nano-material it is not impossible it would float without a vacuum on the inside of the sphere. After all, these structured nano-materials are presently up to 100 times lighter than solid equivalents, and if Dr. Greer is right, may go as high as 1,000 times lighter.