Ultra-Strong Nanotube Composites

TheMatt writes "In a story that makes you say "Cool!", Nicholas Kotov and co-workers have created a nanotube composite material six times stronger than carbon-fiber composites. Their final product is a crosslinked material which appears to be just as strong as silicon carbide and tantalum carbide!"

Comments

Re:No big uses soon...

[Charlton Heston]

Hard is relative. For example, glass is quite hard and brittle, but anyone who has handled a very large pane of glass knows that there is some small amount of flexibility there. Fiber optic cables are also famous for this. Glass fibers, yet the cable has to be flexible enough to lay in a trench.

A space elevator would be very long, and over that length it would have a lot of flexibility. I'd say that this stuff is quite promising.