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Nanotube Applications Grow And Grow
HobbySpacer writes "Carbon nanotubes are starting to transition from interesting laboratory curiosities into interesting technological applications. These apps include non-volatile RAM, flat screen displays, high strength fabrics, and smart skin for structures in aerospace and elsewhere. Perhaps if The Graduate was being made today, the one word for Benjamin Braddock's future would not be "plastics" but "nanotubes"."
The whole point of the "plastics" line was that plastics represent the artificiality of adult life. If nanotubes are made of carbon, then they're not artificial enough!
For me, the best is to come in LCD screens. Faster and cheaper LCD screens, and with better image quality. Now, thats what I call good news.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
From the article: "The ability to place CNTs directly on a substrate while controlling their spacing, size, and length, provides a high quality image with optimized electron emissions, brightness, color purity and resolution for flat panel displays. Other attempts in this field utilize a "paste" or "print" method of applying CNTs, which to date, have not been able to provide the same level of display image quality, or the potential cost savings of Motorola's NED process."
This brings up some interesting ideas !
What happens when the technology for laying the nanotubes onto substrates becomes so good that we
are able to build car frames or house frames from it(think 3D substrates of nanotubes) ?
How about another question , how easy is it for one to recycle this crap.
We already have problems with millions of old junk PC's and monitors, what happens when you have near indestructable nanotube structures ?
Help pay for my wedding! Go to my kickass website
Oh... my god. What a nerd. Ok, it's a magic armor. What made you think physics SHOULD apply you silly sod?
The amusing thing about the plastics mentioning is that it really has come true, as far as market penetration. Almost everything that we deal with is plastic, from the bulk of the styling panels on modern automobiles, to grocery bags, to computer parts. Almost every strap connector is made of plastic, and many ropes are plastic-impregnated for strength and longevity. We ship our food in plastic, we filter our water with it. We contain industrial fluids in it. It's everywhere. It's easy to find devices that are nearly 100% plastic, it's nearly impossible to find something with absolutely no plastic in it whatsoever.
Maybe the Buggles album "Age of Plastic" is fully appropriate by name. Certainly the method I use to play it is plastic...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The reason that plastics are seen to represent artificiality has nothing to do with their core makeup. It has to do with the fact they are used to replace other materials - in a way that mimics the original material without actually having any of the original material. Examples: faux furs and glasses (both cups and eyeglasses apply here). No matter how close in look and feel a plastic comes to the original material, it is still not really that material - and thus is artificial.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Note that stiffness can be different at different timescales; you want a material that's flexible when you try to move it at 1 m/s, and rigid when you try to move it at 500m/s.
So, in conclusion, the ideal armor is ziploc bags of ooblick, duct-taped together. I'm ready for my DARPA grants to pursue this further.
"Economy of scale: Reduction in cost per unit resulting from increased production, realized through operational efficiencies. Economies of scale can be accomplished because as production increases, the cost of producing each additional unit falls."
Or to put it another way, the prototype of the CPU in your computer probably costed a hell of a lot more than "10 times as much as gold", but you probably didn't pay that much for yours.
It's entirely predictable and unsurprising that some of the possible uses of nanotubes will be designed and sometimes prototyped before nanotubes are available in sufficient quantity, quality, and economy to make those uses widely available. The R&D of cheaper production techniques that feed into (and are fed by) economies of scale wouldn't even begin without speculations and prototypes.
Here's a "slow speed" analogy for you. Take a dish cloth (this will be your kevlar or your nanotube t-shirt). Put it over a lump of plastercine (this will be you). Now poke your finger (your bulltet) into the cloth so that it indents into the plastercine.
See the hole in the plastercine? See the lack of tear in your cloth? You still need something to dissipate the energy concentrated at the point of the bullet over a wide area. Kevlar does not do that, nor would any material light and flexible enough to wear as a t-shirt no matter what it's made of.
That's why SWAT personnerl look like tanks instead of sleek scuba-divers - One t-shirt thin layer of Kevlar ain't nearly enough protection.
how do you hold a variable sword? surely it will cut straight through (with no effort) whatever hand/handle is holding it?