Question: What is the weirdest material your have made?

Simone Sturniolo answered on 17 Jun 2013:

Ah, I’ve never ‘made’ a material myself. I study materials, mostly, that someone else makes, trying to understand them better. Science nowadays is a very complex thing, and every discovery can not be made by a single scientist in his lab anymore – it always comes out of the teamwork of different people with different specialization. I specialize in understanding materials, not making them – that’s usually a chemist’s job.

I can tell you about the weirdest material that I did NOT manage to make though. It was during my Master Thesis, and I was supposed to produce some titanium dioxide nanotubes. Titanium dioxide is a rather common material – looks like a white stone and pretty much IS a white stone. “Nanotubes” means that we wanted to make its molecules arranged in the shape of very small tubes. It sounds very hard, but according to the research of some other scientists it could be accomplished with a simple procedure involving a bit of chemistry. I say “according to” because we reproduced their process step by step, but all we got was a bigger, uglier white stone – no trace of nanotubes whatsoever, even with the most powerful electron microscope we could put our hands on! Either something was wrong in those other scientists’ research, or we did some mistake. Either way, the only practical result I got from that experiment is that I experienced first hand how does a chemical burn feel like (I had to use caustic soda during it, and that stuff hurts if it ends up on your skin). Lesson of the day: science can be messy and you will get ten things wrong for every right one, but it’s nevertheless fun!