alternatehistory.com

This is a collection of weird aka „impossible“ materials that might have been discovred earlier and how they could/could not change history.

Metal Organic Framework Mineral

From deep inside a Siberian mine, researchers have catalogued a series of materials unlike any others yet found in the ground. They do, however, bear a startling similarity to certain lab-grown materials that weren’t thought to exist in nature at all—until now.

In the last few decades, chemists have been crafting a series of new materials in their labs called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. These materials are “molecular sponges,” capable of soaking up gases like hydrogen or carbon dioxide—even storing them for future use, like a cell. A new paper in Science Advances reveals that not only are these materials also found in nature, we’ve had them in our hands for over 70 years. We just didn’t know what they were. The samples of the two minerals, stepanovite and zhemchuzhnikovite, were originally catalogued by geologists starting in the 1940s after being pulled from mines in Siberia.

http://gizmodo.com/strange-minerals-from-siberian-mine-are-unlike-anything-1784843835



Upsalite

In yet another example of scientific serendipity, Uppsala University researchers have created an unprecedented material with record-breaking properties. And most remarkable of all, this new material — which was thought impossible to make for over a century — was the result of an accident in the lab. Called upsalite in honor of the university where it was discovered, the material features a surface area of 800 square meters per gram. Scientists have known about natural and ordered forms of magnesium carbonate, both with and without water structure, for quite some time. But creating a water-free disordered version has proven difficult. As early as 1906, German researchers concluded that the material could not be created in the same way as other disordered carbonates, namely by bubbling C02 through an alcoholic suspension. But on one fateful Thursday afternoon in 2011 this all changed. A research team led by Johan Goméz de la Torre made some slight changes to the synthesis parameters of an earlier unsuccessful attempt to create a water-free disordered form of magnesium carbonate — and they left it in the reaction chamber by mistake!

http://io9.gizmodo.com/swedish-researchers-create-an-impossible-material-by-880572412



High Temperature Superconductor

„Lately, Iron-based superconductors have been a hot new thing (er...so to speak) in superconductor research. While many of these compounds are disappointingly complex and unlikely to be fabricated, some are simple and I could quite see some cryogenic scientist in the early 20th century discovering that one or the other of these compounds is superconducting. If so, very intriguing possibilities open up--these compounds can superconduct at much higher temperatures than anything that would be discovered in OTL until the 1980s, and would be difficult to fit into the unified (though, it was later realized, incomplete) theory of superconductivity developed (IOTL) in the late 1950s. That could have major effects on superconductivity research, for the obvious reason that a theory gives you a framework to work within (or against), possibly advancing or slowing it.“
Workable Goblin

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/earlier-technology-thread.169927/

Carbon Nano Tubes

In 1952 L. V. Radushkevich and V. M. Lukyanovich published clear images of 50 nanometer diameter tubes made of carbon in the Soviet Journal of Physical Chemistry.
This discovery was largely unnoticed, as the article was published in the Russian language, and Western scientists' access to Soviet press was limited during the Cold War. It is likely that carbon nanotubes were produced before this date, but the invention of the transmission electron microscope (TEM) allowed direct visualization of these structures.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/wi-soviet-carbon-nanotubes.271215/


Notes
Inspired by the recent rediscovery of MOFs I thought it might be nice to have a thread that includes other similar materials. Personally I don‘ t believe that they would really change a time line particularly much, but they are nice curiosities.
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