Afraid not. The material in question is still brittle and would surely have undesirable optical properties. Besides, the discoverers have yet to make a sample large enough to be seen without a microscope (the largest sample they produced was 8µm in diameter, with most clustering around 3µm), and it remains unclear whether nano-lattice materials can be made in bulk at all, as a practical matter.

In general, ceramics and glasses (both traditional silica glasses and new metallic glasses) all have very high compressive strengths, but very poor tensile strengths. Martensitic steel can combine decent compressive strength with outstanding tensile strength — and, to simplify things a bit, it’s tensile strength which basically corresponds to “damage tolerance” and “resistance to brittle failure.”

They’re also looking at an extremely small sample size that might not scale. Frankly, I’m unaware of any nano-lattice material in use towards any application.

What they’ve done is taken an existing silica glass — a material traditionally very strong in compression — and they’ve structured it so that their sample is a lattice of very narrow struts. This both reduced the defect rate in the glass and enabled them to remove some material, lowering density and improving specific strength.

Ultimately, it’s cool as a scientific curiosity and a work of engineering ingenuity, but it has no near-term practical applications, and it’s not stronger in compression than existing ceramic materials. (e.g. silicon carbide, which has a pretty much identical compressive strength.)

Makes it sound weak. A cubic centimeter of steel would be in the 50 ton range.

Depends on the geometry.

What happens when windows get wet?

Or sand? Or your wine glass or labware?

Nothing. Awesome are the silicates.

Anyway, unlikely that water could permeate far into something with that small a structure. Even as big as 5 microns, the pores on a fine fritted glass filter barely let water through without additional pressure. Related to why water slowly gets trapped in (alumino)silicate molecular sieves.

Also, DNA is made to work in cells which are always wet.

Also, nucleic acids aren’t too different from amino acids, and of course nature makes tons of light and tough and materials with peptides, sometimes reinforced or as a scaffolding for hard inorganic martial. Nature got to this trick first. Like calcium carbonates in shells and bones or hydroxyapatite in dentin in teeth and scales. Not only merely resistant, many creatures obviously live in the water, life came from the water.

Even if I’m wrong about all that, they could just coat the surface of bulk material in polymer or something else waterproof.

Almost. The structure is almost finishing collapsing. Send more grant money.