Gizmodo had a piece on a new heat-insulating film that’s so efficient, you can hold open flames in your hands and not be burned:
Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new material called the Mesoporous Optically Clear Heat Insulator, or MOCHI for short. Unlike the name, MOCHI is no dessert—it’s a nearly transparent, long-lasting silicon gel that insulates so well, you could hold a flame on your palm without getting burned.
…
MOCHI appears flat and transparent on the surface, but zoomed in, the material is actually a collection of tiny pores thinner than the width of a human hair, according to the paper. The secret to MOCHI’s insulating abilities lies within these small air bubbles, which trap incoming or outgoing heat within their networks.
This mechanism is similar to aerogels, which NASA uses to insulate its Mars rovers. However, the air-trapping bubbles in aerogels are typically scattered throughout the material and reflect light, giving the final material a cloudy appearance.
By contrast, MOCHI reflects around 0.2% of incoming light. About 90% of the material is air, making the material almost completely transparent, [senior author Ivan] Smalyukh explained. For one of their experiments, Smalyukh and colleagues applied MOCHI to a cold window and found that doing so stopped roughly 95% of heat transfer, somewhat like high-performance building roofs and walls—but transparent, he added.
—
There’s video at the link and more on the research here, in Science.