The world's lightest material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. It's so light that it can sit on top of a dandelion without disturbing the seeds. Meet the "ultralight metallic microlattice" which is 99.99% made of air.

Researchers at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Composites Center at the University of Southern California and Caltech have invented the new material that is a microlattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel. It only has a density of 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter which is less than one-thousandth of water.

"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said in a news release sent out by UC Irvine.

Another HRL author, Bill Carter compared the design to the Eiffel Tower but on a nano-scale.

"Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture. We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales."

The material is created by beaming ultraviolet light through a reservoir of resin that forms polymer fibers when the light hits it. The fibers then follow the path of the ultraviolet light. Scientists can create multiple interconnected fibers by using multiple beams of light. The polymer fibers are then coated with a thin layer of nickel and after the polymer fibers are dissolved the metal lattice remains. The lattice can be made of other materials other than nickel.

The material actually rebounds after its squashed making it ideal for impact protection uses. The sample compressed to half of its original height rebounds about 98 percent back. It can also be used for acoustic dampening and other battery applications.

The microlattice was developed for the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

And how long will it take for the lightest material to fall to the ground?

"It's sort of like a feather -- it floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density," Carter said. "It takes more than 10 seconds, for instance, for the lightest material we've made to fall if you drop it from shoulder height."