 We're shifting the paradigm of materials creation towards something that's driven by the end goal. So instead of saying, these are all the processes that are available to us, and so the material that we can expect would have these kinds of properties. We're doing it backwards. I want the material to have a certain strength, a certain weight, and based on that we would like to predict what kind of architecture, what kind of structure this material is going to have. What we have been doing in our lab is precisely that. We're creating materials that are very, very lightweight, that can be up to 99% air, but yet that retain their very high stiffness or high strength of their parent material. The concept that we're taking advantage of here is very similar to that of the hard biological systems. It's called the hierarchical design. So the concept of the hierarchical design may be analogous to comparing the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Eiffel Tower. The pyramid stands 174 meters tall and it weighs 10 megatons. Now if you compare it to the Eiffel Tower, it's 374 meters tall and it weighs only 5.7 kilotons. So there's a difference in the factor of a thousand between their weight, yet the Eiffel Tower is very, very strong and it's very, very tall. So what happened was that there were elements of architecture introduced into the design of a pyramid effectively that allowed it to be stronger and more lightweight and hence use less of the material, constituent materials, and be a lot cheaper to construct. If we really want to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we really need to figure out a way to make materials be lighter but yet retain all the other lucrative structural properties, for example, strength and stiffness. There's a huge race right now to who can make the most efficient solar cells and they're still not anywhere near the theoretical limit. Imagine if you could take a variety of different modules, solar cell modules, that are very small. So macroscopically it'll appear like a flat sheet and so it'll be a solar panel just like we would expect. But microscopically it'll actually be a huge array of individual solar cells and what that will enable is a much cheaper production of the solar cells so that solar actually has a chance to compete with the fossil fuels and be utilized as an alternative viable energy source. A major obstacle to these materials being inserted into viable technological applications today is the lack of any kind of a manufacturable process so we can't mass produce them. If there was a way for the universities and the companies and also the policy makers to all work together and form these partnerships, it would be very powerful and we could really start inserting these into the real world applications.