I came across a great read the other day about William T. Wood of Bakersfield, California. In 2003 as a science fair project he made aerogel. For those of you who are not familiar with this interesting material, aerogels are not gels at all. Rather they are a low-density solid material derived from gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly drawn off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. [Wikipedia]

Oh, and if you missed it, William was 10 years old at the time.