Summary:
At Penn State, a group of researchers, have determined the highest known breakdown strength for a bulk glass ever measured. How much energy can be stored in an insulating material before it fails and begins to conduct electricity, is what breakdown strength and dielectric constant refers to. With these two terms, a bulk glass using them, would make a great way for the next generation of high energy density storage capacitors to power many things today that would require gas or electricity. Usually the highest dielectric strengths for bulk glasses are 4-9 MV/cm, but for this test the strengths reached 12 MV/cm! This is remarkable. Nick Smith, Ph.D at Penn State, created the glass so thin that it was able to bend and also able to disinergrate if mishandled. He made it so thin, because the thinner the glass the more electric field could be applied. In this glass burst of lights were made in which is why they are calling it lighting inside.
Impact:
This could impact me in multiple ways, such positive and negative. In a positive way it could affect me by making gas prices go down. It would make the prices go down because it would either lighten the ammount of gas used by my car because it would only need to use gas to accelerate, or it could completely eliminate the gas in a car. This could make hybrid or electric cars cheaper for the public to purchase. If they made this available to customers for their house they could have cheaper electric bills, in the long run helping the economy even out because people would have more money. On the other side though, it could be negative because it has not been tested a lot. Electricity is electricity and if you ever had direct contact with it you could be incredibly harmful. I personally think more test should be performed to make sure that this is safe and reliable.
