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If this little face looks a little . . . well, deflated, that’s because it literally is. This is a scanning electron microscope image of a hollow polystyrene sphere. When Arkaprabha Giri, a postdoc in Christopher Jones’s lab at Georgia Tech, first made it as part of his research into materials for capturing carbon dioxide from air, the sphere was filled with ethyl acetate solvent from the polymerization. But after Giri removed the solvent, the sphere burst and collapsed into this dejected-looking husk. Giri says he was trying to make rigid spheres, but they turned out hollow after he added a pore-forming ingredient to his polymer recipe.
Submitted by Arkaprabha Giri
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