"Admiral, there be whales here!" - Life imitates Trek

Star Trek fans may recall a scene from the big-screener "The Voyage Home" in which Scotty provides a flabbergasted twentieth-century engineer with a formula for "transparent aluminum" - in exchange for the material and facilities he needed to build a huge, humpbacked whale-housing aquarium (long story).

Anyway, it appears that the folks at the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies have succeeded in slapping together some of the fictional high-strength material on their own - without the benefit of everyone's favorite Enterprise engineer.

Slashdot | Transparent Aluminium