Misleading name, on the same level as calling water "non-explosive hydrogen". That said the material looks promising, as a glass replacement for some applications (the text mentions a few of them, like armoured windows).
(It is not a metal; it's a ceramic, mostly oxygen with bits and bobs of aluminium and nitrogen. Interesting nonetheless, even if I'm picking on the name.)
3 times as tough as steel and they're making bulletproof glass out of it...
There's a low budget pc game about colonizing Mars and this was one of the things in the tech tree
Crazy to see it as a real thing now.
Like OG aluminum, this is going to be crazy expensive at first, but in a century it'll likely be cheap and we'll see it replacing glass in the most mundane uses.
We'll see it replace phone screens pretty quickly tho. A few mm's of this and we'll have legitimately unbreakable screens, and even if a scratch happens, you should be able to just buff it out. They're probably wrap entire phones it honestly. One solid piece that makes repair impossible on your own.
Transparent aluminum is so weird, a piece of it was once passed around our office. It felt heavier and colder than I expected, which I guess is probably because it's much denser than most types of glass (I think it's only comparable to optical glass so it would be close to holding a high quality glass lens) and it looks like the thermal conductivity is way higher.
Aluminum oxynitride is transparent aluminum, but alpha aluminum oxide, which is also transparent, is called Corundum, Ruby, or Sapphire. That name is dumb.