Click Chemistry Clicks Along

摘要

Halfway into a talk at a meeting here last month, Charles Hoyle, a chemist at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, whipped out a clear plastic disk a few centimeters thick and about the size of a small Frisbee. Lodged in the disk were two bullets-one .22 caliber and one .38-fired by one of his colleagues in the lab. The disc, Hoyle explained, is a laminate of two materials, one a rigid plastic, the other a new rubbery, highly efficient, energy-absorbing material. Putting the two materials together allowed the disk to absorb the energy of the speeding bullets and dissipate it without shattering. What's more, the bullet-stopping armor was made of cheap, everyday starting materials. In addition to armor, such laminates may one day find use in impact-resistant windshields for cars and airplanes, Hoyle says. "That was the most exciting thing I've seen in a couple of months," says K. Barry Sharpless, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California.