Vibranium in the Real World

In the Marvel Universe, vibranium is a rare material found in Wakanda, home of King T'Challa (aka Black Panther). Vibranium's unique properties have enabled Wakanda to become an unrivaled technological powerhouse. Is there anything close to vibranium in the real world? Johns Hopkins materials scientists Luo Gu and Anthony Shoji Hall explain.
Video Transcript:
[Music: "Cast of Pods" - Doug Maxwell]
Luo Gu: Vibranium actually was introduced by Stan Lee to Marvel's comics back in the 60s. I think a lot of people have heard of carbon fibers. Those are very strong. As a matter of fact, their tensile strength, which is the resistance to permanent deformation is about ten times stronger than steel. They're really light. Their density is about 1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, which is 20% or a quarter to that of steel. So from those two properties, carbon fiber is actually quite close to vibranium. A lot of people in my field, which by the way I work in the biomaterials field, actually use carbon nanotubes or graphene as drug delivery vehicles. And the reason is because those are carbon-based materials. They are somewhat biodegradable and they're less costly than some of the metallic materials or some of the polymeric materials. So besides being super strong they also have really interesting magnetic and electronic properties.
Anthony Shoji Hall: My research is focused on tackling problems in renewable energy. The world is powered off of oil, and oil is a resource that is abundant but it creates a lot of pollution when it's combusted. So I'm working on some electrochemical devices like fuel cells. I do work with carbon nanoparticles because I put catalysts on top of carbon supports all the time. So those materials are conductive and they're very lightweight. When I want to make nanoparticles that are very well dispersed on a catalyst surface, I tend to use high surface area carbon materials; I just use basic carbon blacks because they're cheap. A vibranium for me would be something that is very very cheap but has very high catalytic properties. So right now most of the catalysts used in the research that I work on are made out of platinum, palladium, gold. Very expensive metals but they're very good catalysts. If we want to make the type of research that I do commercializable, we'll want to have some similar catalytic properties but use materials that are as cheap as iron, or nickel, or something like that.