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Anyway, I like this one much better..

You know, I've often wondered why we don't join some of our existing technologies together and get on with things. I know it may not be as simple as it sounds, but we have this tech already:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/54170/title/Let_there_be_light
(Allows for manipulation of neurons with light)

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl051811%2B
http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/41146
(Nanoscale OLED displays)

http://www.egmrs.org/EJS/PDF/vo281/1.pdf
http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=6802
(Nanoscale light detectors)

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2108/zsj.22.535?journalCode=jzoo
http://www.jove.com/index/details.stp?ID=2081
(And we can stain cells with dyes that fluoresce when the cells experience activity now)

We have peanut butter, jelly and bread. Why can't we get this all together to make a sandwich? Or is this currently in the works?
Or am I missing something subtle, that someone who actually knows about this research can enlighten us about?

TFA states:

Instead of objects measuring 10 nanometers — thought to be the about the smallest scientists could see using such microscopes — Chu came up with a system using existing technology to see objects... as small as half a nanometer.

Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NSOM) has been an active area of research for over 25 years, and sub-nanometer aperture instruments have been on the market for over 20 years.

Unfortunately, neither the poster nor TFA linked Chu's paper, or any other source of real information about Chu's claims. It could very well be that he has done something new and useful, but it sure doesn't sound like it from this article.

For example, lets examine one of the pieces of insanity on his site. He mentions embedding supercapacitors into the road surface to store energy (I assume overnight). If you don't know what those things are, they would be the filthy expensive, highly experimental, rarely used in commercial products devices with lower than battery storage capacity.

First off, right there, you completely discredited yourself. Supercapacitors are a billion dollar market today, and are projected to grow to 8.3 billion dollars by 2015. There are anything but "experimental"; they're a mass-market product. What year are you living in, 1990?

Since the enthalpy of fusion of water 333 J/g, then 200J of energy will melt 0.6g of water. A layer of water (or ice) 0.6g/cm^2 is 6mm deep.

Snow is not ice. Snow has a density of about 0.1g/cm^2 (it varies). That's 6cm of snow, or almost 2 1/2 inches. And that's ignoring the snow that gets melted by the heat of the road; keeping a road clear of snow and ice means it heats up more in the sunlight. Anyone who lives in a snowy area can tell you that the first snow to fall on a completely clear road melts right off; the snow has to cool the road before it can stick.

AND, you're forgetting that this is gridded. Not everywhere gets snow at the same time, not everything has to be melted at the same time (just like everything doesn't get plowed at the same time), and so forth. Really, what's your argument -- that a non-gridded version wouldn't work well in Buffalo, so the whole concept is silly? To top it all off, you picked a small supercapacitor, and its numbers include casing, monitoring electronics, etc -- things that on the large scale will decrease.

assuming that the weak winter sunlight was sufficient to fully charge the capacitors during the previous day.

I already do the math earlier in this thread; the road should produce enough energy to melt about 4 inches of snow per sunny day.

Not to mention that no matter how much capacity you have, there's not enough sunlight to charge it.

Yeah, nice bold assertion, Numbers Guy.

On one of the pages, he mentions a target price of USD48 per square foot.

He shows cost-competitiveness with asphault at about $10,000 per panel, *not* counting tangential benefits such as the cost of transmission infrastructure, reduced road maintenance, plowing, health benefits, etc. That's $70 per square foot.

"Divide this amount by the 4.84 billion Solar Road Panels(TM) required to replace the asphalt, and we get a target cost of $9923.16 per panel."

Done.

for example: http://www.azonano.com/Details.asp?ArticleID=1586

The earlier work was completely theoretical - the paper in question here is an experimental result.

Why do we care? A lot of reasons - the casimir effect is deeply rooted in quantum physics, but is observable without having to cool things to quantum temperatures. This sort of research is also potentially very important in nanotechnology - if we want our nanosurfaces to not stick, we should make them corrugated - the opposite of the macroworld!

Many times, people have calculated these casimir forces by assuming that the quantum force between two plates by just adding up the forces between particles (pairwise additivity). This is the first (I believe) research that shows this failing experimentally - there are large-scale geometrical effects. This is exciting, as it means that there may be many ways to tune casimir forces, making them do whatever we want - theoretical predictions on piston-like geometries have forces that are attractive at one distance, and repulsive at another!

If anyone's interested, the actual paper is at http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.3776 and better summaries (Moore's law wtf?) are at http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11402849 and http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=6827

Carbon nanotubes are usually manufactured by vaporising graphite impregnated with metal particles. The carbon condenses on the metal, forming tubular molecules. There's more information on the process here.

Interestingly, this same material is being used in a variety of other fields, including medical; specifically in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

From the article: Engineered Nanomaterials Improve Magnetic Resonance

The financial calculations of space elevator proponents convniently assume that they get to use these miracle materials (which don't really exist yet outside of laboratories) . . .

Mass production methods have already been developed, although not necessarily at the quality necessary for space elevators. They are certainly becoming more than just an interesting lab experiment, though, and techniques can only improve with time.

. . . while comparing them with the current state of competing launch technologies without the benefit of new developments.

If a space elevator is feasible, then it should always beat a conventional rocket, since it doesn't have to lift its own fuel weight. Once it's built, it just needs the energy to move the lifter. And that energy can come cheep and with low environmental impact, since a space elevator makes microwave power satellites economically viable.

They had at least two open goal chances. It came down to old-fashioned skills.

You are quite right in saying so, and it was entirely my intention to make that point. As I said, the industry has quite some time before growing beyond its infancy. However, the main point to be made is that people are attempting to be forward thinking and, indeed, pragmatic enough to realize that the requisite infrastructure for the elevator must be established. Only then may genuine progress be made towards making what today remains science fiction into reality.

As for current realities: many promising, potentially useful applications are developed every year.

Also, they are already working on it. http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=808

Shouldn't be impossible to buy a development kit from whatever company makes the AMS and hack it into your keyboard. It will probably mean a second cable, but you can always use cable ties to secure it to the primary cable. Lemme check something. . .

. . . back. Check out this link, that might help someone track down the mfgr. Another option might be to disassemble one of those anti-theft motion detector PC cards. like this one

Indeed, we are a long way from making 40,000-km-long carbon nanotubes. One serious question is how practical it is to depend on something like this being built.

But it's only been a few years since the first carbon nanotubes were created. The first were only nanometers long. Then others reported making some that were micrometers long. And a couple of months ago, there was the first report of millimeter-long nanotubes.

This is rather rapid progress, around 9 orders of magnitude in about a decade. And the folks at Duke not only reached a 2-mm length, but they did it by continuously growing the tubes. And they can generate cross-connections between the tubes. Others are now experimenting with continuously-grown nanotubes. With funding to support the flock of researchers, it wouldn't be at all surprising to read about indefinitely-long nanotubes (or sheets of them with periodic cross-connections) within a year or two.

Then, instead of the first construction being done by sending up a huge spool of nanotubes and unwinding it in orbit, we'll read of them sending up a nanotube-manufacturing machine, which will extrude the tubes a few at a time and lower them to Earth.

A bigger problem, mentioned by Clark in Fountains of Paradise, is the cloud of space junk left over from thousands of earlier launches. The real expense will be the equipment to track every little particle passing through the Earth's neighborhood. To keep the elevator safe, we'll have to spot even tiny objects far enough in advance to send a wiggle down the rope just in time to move it aside when an object passes.

But, of course, this observing equipment will have huge scientific value itself, as it builds up a huge database of every little object in the solar system.

And the intermediate uses are developing. There are already sensors and drug-deliver devices being built that use nanotubes of various lengths. This is helping to get funding to the nanotube researchers.

it's nice when people respond - thanks, hs.

Here's another article on buckyball toxicity in fish. It's not the nanotubes used in the memory, but another small carbon fuerene-esque structure.

But, the solution might be to take flash pictures of everything I eat or breathe. :-)

I think you'll find that buckyballs kill brain cells