A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has designed one of the strongest lightweight materials known, by compressing and fusing flakes of graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon, informed the MIT website.

The new material, a sponge-like configuration with a density of just 5 percent, can have a strength ten times that of steel.

In its two-dimensional form, graphene is thought to be the strongest of all known materials.