some time ago, tubing science blogger Veritasium did something particularly cool: he made himself full-body waterproof with hydrophobic aerogel.

after he was covered with these aerogel powders, he became like this when he went into the water:

his skin looks silver under the water, because the surface of his skin is not soaked by water at all. but through a layer of air, the light reflects on the interface between air and water and looks particularly bright, which reflects the hydrophobic nature of the material. When he came out of the pool, he was still dry.

aerogel is a very interesting material. Imagine a hydrogel with a reticular structure enclosing water, and then imagine that the water in it has turned into air. This is aerogel. What we see here is a kind of silica aerogel, which has many potential properties, such as very good thermal insulation and light weight.

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but silica aerogels themselves are not hydrophobic, because they contain hydroxyl groups and have many pores, they are actually easy to absorb water. However, water absorption will affect the performance of the aerogel, so people will use chemical modification and other methods to hydrophobic silica aerogel, after hydrophobic treatment of the aerogel can achieve the effect mentioned at the beginning.

the whole piece of hydrophobic aerogels goes like this:

Veritasium's video shows many interesting properties of aerogels, such as his own demonstration of the thermal insulation properties of aerogels and how people can improve their fragility and make them into composites.

if you are interested, you can watch the original video. Although I don't suggest you imitate it, it really looks like fun. _ (: interesting "∠) _ address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcdB5bFwio4

another dynamic picture related to hydrophobic aerogel: dynamic picture appreciation: water droplets that cannot be poked into