Prof. Wardle, Dr. Luiz Acauan, former MIT postdoc Dr. Haozhe Wang, and collaborators at the University of Tokyo have recently produced centimeter-scale structures that are packed with billions of hollow aligned boron nitride nanotubes (BNNT). These nanotubes, coined as "white graphene", have grown considerable attention in nanotube science for being similar to carbon nano tubes (CNT) in molecular structure and strength yet withstand higher temperatures and is electrically insulating, rather than conductive. The team's results were published in ACS Nano, providing a path toward fabricating aligned boron nitride nanotubes (A-BNNT) in bulk. They plan to utilize this technique to fabricate hierarchical structures to make stronger, more heat-resistant composites with applications to shield space structures and hypersonic aircraft.