New glass cuts carbon footprint by nearly half and is 10x more damage resistant

LionGlass named after Penn State's mascot is a new type of glass engineered by researchers at Penn State that requires significantly less energy to produce and is much more damage resistant than standard soda lime silicate glass. With LionGlass, the melting temperatures are lowered by about 300 to 400 degrees Celsius, which leads to a roughly 30% reduction in energy consumption compared to conventional soda lime glass. LionGlass is at least 10 times as crack-resistant compared to standard soda lime glass, which forms cracks under a load of about 0.1 kilograms force. Since LionGlass is 10 times more damage resistant than current glass, it could be significantly thinner.

I'd guess this glass gains self-healing behavior against scratches, because it's actually in state of high viscosity ("rubbery state") rather than vitrification. These advantages will undoubtedly come with many disadvantages, like the price of materials and/or low chemical resistance. The problem of many hyped progressivists technologies is, they just dissolve the cost of energy in another areas of industry (raw sources, maintenance and damage control etc.) - so that no actual net savings are provided at the end. See also:

• Alkali-doped And Alkali-free Boroaluminosilicate Glass a glass comprising from about 50 mol % to about 70 mol % SiO2; from about 5 mol % to about 20 mol % Al2O3; from about 12 mol % to about 35 mol % B2O3; up to about 5 mol % MgO; up to about 12 mol % CaO; and up to about 5 mol % SrO Boroaluminosilicate glasses are notoriously used in analytical chemistry as they have low melting point.
• Structure-property relations in crack-resistant alkaline-earth aluminoborosilicate glasses The usage of multivalent elements makes glass scratch resistant as it expands glass transition temperature range (i.e. the scope of "rubbery state").
• Experts lessen carbon footprint while improving glass YouTube videopresentation
• A new glass for the future: Taking LionGlass out of the lab and into the market
• Low temperature sealing glass another patent of glass solders containing more than 50% lead oxide, by weight