It's basically right out of a spy movie: a glider swoops into enemy territory at night, lands with some sort of secret message or item, and then vanishes without a trace in the pink light of dawn.
"Now where did this come from?" our unwitting villain says, bending down to pick it up… Okay, okay, I might be getting a little overexcited.
But as of this week, a disappearing plane could really exist.
At a meeting of the American Chemical Society, researchers announced that they have created a material that vaporizes in sunlight.
It's all thanks to the incredible power of chemistry.
The material is a polymer known as polyphthalaldehyde or PPHA.
Polymers are like chains.
They're big molecules made up of many repeated smaller units chemically bonded together.
Each link in the chain is held together by one or more chemical bonds, and under the right circumstances, those bonds start to come apart and the whole chain can disintegrate.
But when that happens is dependent on the particular polymer and what's known as its ceiling temperature.
