Tube-in-tube structure going strong

If you reduce the density of a material, its stiffness will also be reduced. But scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have noticed that materials that are based on sandwich nanotubes retained their stiffness at lower densities. Modelling by materials scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands showed that the material retained almost all of its stiffness when the nanotubes were created with more space between them.