Free Republic

"I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science.... Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals. They're very common — in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are — and very well understood. Brass is an alloy. So is steel. Even most naturally occurring gold on Earth is an alloy made up of elemental gold mixed with other metals, like silver or copper. "There are databases of all known phases...

IAMOND-HARD ARMOR The media tends to depict bullet-proof armor as something that’s thick and heavier than regular clothes. Despite being for bodily protection, the added bulk of that armor might restrict a person’s movements. But scientists at the City University of New York’s Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) have found that diamond-hard armor doesn’t need to be thick. The key to less-bulky protection is graphene, a tightly-packed layer of bonded carbon atoms one million times thinner than a piece of paper. The researchers discovered that two layers of graphene stacked on top of one another can temporarily become as hard...

A wonder material as flexible as tinfoil but hard enough to stop a speeding bullet has been created in the lab. Diamene is made using two layers of graphene, the world's first two-dimensional material which is just one atom thick, a million times thinner than human hair. Such a substance could be used for anything from water-resistant protective coatings to ultra-light bulletproof armour.