This is an old obsolete txt file. Instead go to BIO-AEROGEL SPECULATIONS (c)1996 William Beaty 1. In 1993 at the Exhibits shop where I worked someone was welding a galvanized electrical box to a steel frame in an exhibit case. This was unwise, since zinc evaporates at a low temperature, and zinc fumes are poisonous. But this is beside the point. When the sealed electrical box was opened, it was found to contain transparent blue-white feathery material akin to soap suds but with no visible bubbles. I recognized it as a type of aerogel. The welding was done adjacent to a small hole in the steel box, and zinc vapor apparently flowed into the hole and was deposited within the box. Apparently aerogels can form naturally; it doesn't take bizarre triple-point high pressure manipulations to create them. The resulting material was very strange: almost transparent, much lighter than Styrofoam, and as fragile as dry soap suds. 2. In 1989 Corum and Corum managed to produce "Ball Lightning" using carbon and a pair of large Tesla coils. They are of the opinion that the resulting "BL" is a material made up of hot, incandescent microscopic carbon percolation structure, i.e., carbon aerogel. See 3. Organic life is based upon water-based, gel-like structures; upon microscopic solids embedded in liquids. Life is based on gels in water, so maybe life exists which is based on gels in air. 4. Trevor James Constable reports the existence of "sky creatures" which live in the atmosphere, are invisible, move under their own power, and can be photographed with IR film. And there have always been reports of glowing "will-o-the-wisp" objects which move through the air, which depart when chased, etc. 5. Birgitt Sattler of the University of Innsbruck is part of a team which measured 1500 bacteria per ml in water from clouds. See If bacteria exist in clouds, then bacterial "powder" appears downstream of evaporating clouds, and perhaps something evolved to feed off this material. Bacteria can act as the bottom of a food chain. PERHAPS ORGANIC LIFE HAS AN AEROGEL-ANALOG? Since it's not impossible that aerogels can form naturally, atmospheric life forms might exist which are based on aerogels and electrostatics rather than on water-gels and ionic chemistry. The gas-based analog to ionic chemistry in solutions is plasma chemistry. Since unlike water, air is an insulator and can support long-range electric fields, an aerogel/plasma life form might propel itself by manipulating e-fields. Vertical motion would be easy to accomplish, since the atmosphere has a natural vertical e-field which would apply up/down forces to a negatively or positively charged aerogel object. By spewing negative ions, a organism would rise as the ionized air fell. The existence of aerogel/plasma organisms would explain some reports of distant moving lights at night, encounters with "will-o-the-wisps," bioluminescent patterns in the air over the Indian ocean, and reports of ball lightning when thunderstorms are lacking. An aerogel creature would be as invisible as an underwater ice-cube, and might only be detectable when it causes slight optical distortion of background objects. If their density was low enough, small aerogel fragments might be present in quantity in the atmosphere without being noticed, since they would have about the same index of refraction as air. If they were composed of approximately the same material as natural aerosols, chemical analysis of the air would miss them. SEE: high-speed sky creatures @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ SUGGESTED HOBBYIST EXPERIMENTS (as yet untried) ELECTROMETER ARRAY: build a long linear array of electrostatic voltmeters many tens of feet in length and mount it outdoors perpendicular to the usual wind direction. Record the outputs with a data logger. If small, electrically-charged objects should pass by over some of the electrometers, the location and possibly the size and height of the objects will be revealed in the recorded data. Even electrically-neutral objects might be detected if they distort the natural sky-voltage. Choose the location of the array judiciously, since these life forms might avoid cities and cities downwind areas, might avoid (or be attracted to) bodies of water, power lines, the turbulence of highways and their downwind pollution etc. IR SKY SURVEY: Set up IR cameras to watch for moving organisms. Inexpensive CCD video cameras and slow-frame security VCRs would make this fairly easy to accomplish. Deep-IR CCDs might turn up more interesting results, but at greater expense. If paired with the Electrometer Array, an IR camera could be triggered only when an e-field anomaly was detected. SCHLERIEN PHOTOGRAPHY: If a large telescope mirror,spotlight mirror, or fresnel lens is available, an outdoor Schlerien setup could be used to capture shadowgrams of possible aerogel objects. A laser or other powerful pointsource is directed at the mirror from many feet distance, and a lens is used to spread the source beam to cover the entire mirror. A knife-edge is placed at the focused image of the laser and adjusted to partially block the light. A few inches behind the knife edge, a lens-less CCD camera is placed. Any distortion in the air between the laser and the mirror will be projected as shadows upon the CCD camera (dip your hand in alcohol and hold it in the beam, and the camera should see your hand-shadow surrounded by rising vapors.) View the camera output, turn the contrast knob way up, and watch for moving structures. CRITTER NET: if aerogel organisms exist, then there should be an entire ecology of sky-creatures ranging from bacteria-analogs to higher forms. Perhaps these organisms or their detrius can be collected with a filter. If a large cone-shaped net of fine plastic mesh (bug screening from a tent?) is erected and allowed to filter material from the breeze, will a quantity of "invisible" aerogel matter be captured? Mount such a net on a balloon and go fishing in the clouds. Or perhaps a large metal object can be charged to a few tens of KV and attract aerogel matter to its surface from the air. How does one see an invisible aerogel? Use it to deflect a laser? Schlerien photography setup? View it with IR cameras? CARBON AEROGEL: try generating carbon aerogels in air or in an inert atmosphere. Cutting torches and electric arcs should both be tried. In my original observation, aerogel was formed when superheated vapor traveled through an orifice and encountered a cold metal plate. The zinc aerogel was the equivalent of soot, but it was deposited so quickly that it did not have time to pack into a solid white crust and instead built a gel structure. Non-oxygen environment is probably required; buckyballs and nanotubes turn to CO2 in normal air. If successful, try passing electric arcs and capacitor discharges through these aerogels. Ball lightning may be the result. ((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website EE/programmer/sci-exhibits science projects, tesla, weird science Seattle, WA 206-762-3818 freenrg-L taoshum-L vortex-L webhead-L