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Nanotubes from Vodka & Whisky
seawasp writes "Synthezising nanotubes from vodka and whisky with simple equipment making it much cheaper and more available to future science projects such as the development of smaller electronic components. Read more about it at
Daily Yomiuri On-Line.
Just a note, I hope for the sake of my life they won't extract nanotubes from beer."
I'll 'drink' to that!
Laugh. +5 funny!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
That's a pretty damn cool party trick.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Absolut
Space Elevator
Something nobody seems to want to talk about is the feasibility of propelling an object composed of somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred atoms. Remember Newton? F=ma ring a bell? To find the acceleration of a nanobot, a = F/m where F is the thrust of the propellant and m the mass of the nanobot. The thrust can be calculated by multiplying the mass of the propellent by its acceleration which in turn equals 2v/d (v = the final velocity and d the atomic radius).
Plug these numbers in and you'll find that even if the propellant consists of a single atom the forward velocity of the nanobot will be somewhere in the region of 1/100th of the speed of light. That may not sound like much, but even 1/1000 * 3e8 m/s = 3e5 m/s = 300 km/s = 1080000 km/h!
There's no way I'm letting one of these babies into my body..
I think nanobots would have other problems besides going too fast though... A few hundred atoms? That's way smaller than even simple bacteria! A few hundred atoms is tiny, so unimaginably tiny that it would be a bit silly even thinking about trying to make robots that small. I mean just think about the control system a simple robot needs... you need a couple of transistors at the very least, and the last I heard batteries (or capacitors) don't work very well when you've only got a couple of hundred atoms worth of storage to play with. And just what would a robot that small actually accomplish? No, I think that the robots that we will eventually put into the bloodstream will be in the order of a couple of hundred microns across, not a couple of hundred atoms.
:-)
Besides, what about brownian motion?
I am artificially intelligent.
Do you drink your whiskey on emacs or... no...
Is this process GPLed or BSD... no...
Oh my god, I have nothing interesting to say.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Would it be that this was an April Fools joke? Or has someone seen those chemistry textbooks?
In Murphy We Turst
"I hope for the sake of my life they won't
extract nanotubes from beer."
Is that sah-kee in your beer, or just rice wine?
If nanotubes are a no-go, how about buckyballs in your beer?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I always wondered what Beer Goggles were made out of.
The world is coming to an end!
There's a nanotech story on the front page of Slashdot AND HEMOS DIDN'T POST IT!
Is he off sick or something?
;-)
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Just out of curiosity does anyone know what kind of nanotubes are being produced here?
I did some work on theory behind making these things into digital circuits but it was really sensitive to the kind of tube you could get. Some are metalic, some are semiconductors, some are skinnier than others which actually matters.
When I was up on the research to get conducting tubes the best process was DC electric arcing of carbon rods mixed w/ boron.
Anybody know how this one stacks up?
Now that would be an interesting story.
-- SIGFPE
Something nobody seems to want to talk about is the feasibility of propelling an object composed of somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred atoms. Remember Newton? F=ma ring a bell? To find the acceleration of a nanobot, a = F/m where F is the thrust of the propellant and m the mass of the nanobot. The thrust can be calculated by multiplying the mass of the propellent by its acceleration which in turn equals 2v/d (v = the final velocity and d the atomic radius).
These calculations vaguely resemble the calculations for a rocket in vacuum, but a) you don't give any actual parameter values, b) you need a few more parameters in there to get meaningful answers, and c) a nanobot is moving through a viscous fluid environment, not vacuum.
Plug these numbers in and you'll find that even if the propellant consists of a single atom the forward velocity of the nanobot will be somewhere in the region of 1/100th of the speed of light.
In order to go at 1/100th the speed of light from firing one atom of exhaust off, the exhaust atom would have to be fired at relativistic speeds. This is easily shown from conservation of momentum (exhaust momentum equals momentum imparted to the nanobot). You probably want to re-check your calculations.
In practice, a nanobot works the same way as any aircraft or watercraft - it uses its environment as reaction mass, instead of expending its own mass, and moves at a more or less constant speed (the speed at which drag and thrust are equal), instead of accelerating freely.
The real problem with nanobots is that because they're tiny, they have a huge surface-to-volume ratio, which means drag is very strong (this is made worse by the fact that things are a lot stickier at such small scales). The result of this is that a nanobot either has to be externally powered, or has to drift with the currents in the fluid that contains it, because otherwise it'll rapidly expend all of its stored energy trying to move through the air or water that it's swimming in.
is this really a breakthrough. Anyone with any real cold hard facts to support the breakthrough criteria?
The team then used 96 proof vodka and 54 proof whisky instead of pure alcohol and successfully recreated a smaller amount of the material. Nanotubes were not created from mixtures with lower alcohol contents.
It looks like beer is proof against nanotube construction.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.