Transparent Aluminum: Not Just For Trekkers Anymore

Well, at least according to Fox News, so, take it with a grain of salt.

Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.

The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman's plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.

The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is.

And then the article continues to ramble on pointlessly, never touching on such "metallic glass" again, and neglecting to explore whether or not it would necessarily be transparent, since not all glass can be easily seen through.

Lynda Carter may have been let down at this lack of follow through, but Star Trek fans were unphased, knowing that Scotty would eventually come back in time to share the secrets of transparent aluminum when we're just about ready to kill the last whale on the planet.

But hey, what do we expect from FauxNews anyway? Here's some more lack of science in this article:

Some materials crystallize as they cool, arranging their atoms into a highly regular pattern called a lattice, Royall said, but although glass "wants" to be a crystal, as it cools the atoms become jammed in a nearly random arrangement, preventing it from forming a regular lattice.

In the 1950s, Sir Charles Frank in the Physics Department at Bristol suggested that the arrangement of the "jam" should form what is known as an icosahedron, but at the time he was unable to prove it.

An icosahedron is like a 3-D pentagon, and just as you cannot tile a floor with pentagons, you cannot fill 3-D space with icosahedrons, Royall explained. That is, you can't make a lattice out of pentagons.

No, an icosahedron is not like a 3-D pentagon. Every gamer geek, and even the ancient romans know that, but Fox doesn't. Maybe they meant a regular platonic dodecahedron, which at least has pentagonal faces. If you're a multinational corporation publishing articles about science, you think you could spring for some basic fundamental mathematical and scientific fact checking before going to print.

But even then, you can tile a floor with pentagons. See the example on the right:
So even the analogy is wrong, and would only be correct if amended to "you can't tile a floor with adjacent regular equilateral pentagons of the same size without leaving non-pentagonal gaps between them."

Perhaps instead they meant that glass is like a 3-D Pentagon, meaning that if glass had an hour's warning that a hijacked plane were going to crash into it, it still wouldn't launch interceptors or anti-aircraft missiles in it's own defense, since the glass could advance it's administrations agenda more directly by taking the hit and allowing massive deaths of Americans so as to justify a war and the wholesale raping of the Constitution. But if that's what they meant, Fox News should be ashamed of itself for defaming a noble substance like glass in such ways.