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

One has to admit..

[QuantumG]

That's a pretty damn cool party trick.

Re:One has to admit..

[BroadbandBradley]

yeah, I got some Vodka here, now I just need a REAL good magnifying glass and some REAL sharp tweezers, and I can start a Nanotube production lab.

wonder how much I'd get for each tube?

New ad.

[Picass0]

Absolut

Space Elevator

Re:New ad.

[Bearpaw]

Absolut
Space Elevator

Built by a joint Russian/Irish shpathe conth- ..., spice conzter- ..., er, group to build high thingth.

if(atoms 200) device != robot

[nebbian]

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? :-)

No Comment

[alacqua]

How about a vodka beowulf... no...

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.

Re:No Comment

[Verne]

> Move on. There's nothing to see here.

There sure wasn't....

A few days late

[heikkile]

Hirose has also synthesized diamonds from alcoholic beverages. The process was described in high school chemistry textbooks.

Would it be that this was an April Fools joke? Or has someone seen those chemistry textbooks?

Re:A few days late

[Anonymous Coward]

Hirose has also synthesized diamonds from alcoholic beverages. The process was described in high school chemistry textbooks.

Would it be that this was an April Fools joke? Or has someone seen those chemistry textbooks?

I can believe both claims.

The usual method for growing diamond films uses methane as the carbon source. Alcohol (ethanol) is simple enough that I could see it working in the place of methane.

Ditto for growing buckytubes. Heat up a cloud of alcohol vapour, and the OH group will steal a hydrogen and detach as water, bonding two alcohol molecules. Hydrogen remaining on the carbon chains comes off as methane or hydrogen if sufficiently persuaded. What you end up with is mess containing graphite and a few graphite sheets rolled into fullerene tubes.

Remember, buckyballs and buckytubes can be found in _candle soot_. Producing them's not hard - it's producing them at high yields with very specific characteristics that's the tough part.

Sake? Beer?

[marcus]

"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?

Beer Goggles

[nucal]

Hirose has also synthesized diamonds from alcoholic beverages. The process was described in high school chemistry textbooks.

I always wondered what Beer Goggles were made out of.

Shock Horror!

[GregWebb]

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?

;-)

Vodka & Whisky from Nanotubes

[SIGFPE]

Now that would be an interesting story.

Re:Nano is a big scam

[Mr_Matt]

Hmm? Your wacky calculations bely your nick "physics genius." Using your calculations, I can produce just about any acceleration I choose, based on the choice of the "final velocity". I also think you fail to understand the difference between thrust and force - certainly insofar as the fact that your equation for "thrust" has units of frequency. Care to check your math? You also present velocities as accelerations - but I had to laugh.

Finally, you have to realize that nobody is trying to 'propel' nanobots - the idea is that they sweep along in whatever material (be it blood, water, air, whatever) they are suspended in. Even so, the kinetic energy imparted from the oxidation of a single atom of propellant, as you postulate, would not be sufficient to propel a nanobot at even a minute fraction of c. Please work that out for yourself, but check your math this time. :)

Re:quality?

[ilbrec]

Well, I think it is quite simple that they are talking about carbon nanotubes. Since these nanotubes are made of carbon, I don't think they can be metallic nanotube. Given some form of carbon do conduct electricity (graphite, for example), they probably are semiconductor. They probably have a long cage like structure; somewhat like enormously stretched fullerene (bucky ball). That structure will make the tubes possible to conduct the electricity, as there are a lot of delocalized electrons (just as polybenzene conduct electricity).

The beer is safe

[j_w_d]

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.