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."

Comments

Nano is a big scam

[PhysicsGenius]

Nano technology for things like wires is one thing. But nanobots will never happen.

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..