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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 space elevator could do double duty as the worlds longest (and thinnest) supercomputer?
My rights don't need management.
And as far as commercial entities go, don't forget IBM's find back in September of 2002, which was making nanotubes with carbon instead of metal.
What's next? jewelry? pencils? life?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
fishing rods.. what about fishing rods ?!
what on earth would you do with a carbine rifle that small?
i guess even nanites are set to participate in the arms race.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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!
What happens when someone starts to create viruses with these Nanotubes ? It'll be a brave new world then :-P
Help pay for my wedding! Go to my kickass website
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.
SciAm has run several articles on nanotubes over the years, several are indexed here, along with more general nanotech articles:
http://www.sciam.com/nanotech_directory.cfm
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
That's all fine and dandy, but a bullet proof piece of clothing 'as light as a t-shirt' wouldn't so squat. Kevlar is a pretty light material too, the reason bullet proof vests are so heavy is because of the large impact absorbing plates. Without some impact absorbance, the bullet would just end up dragging a whole bunch of cloth into the gaping hole in your chest. You have to have something to absorb the kinetic energy; and a t-shirt just doesn't cut it.
Space elevator.
Variable sword.
Shadow-square wire.
Don't write these off as goofy SF ideas. These are well-thought-out designs with only one "If Only". When the final engineering solution for the "if only" part of the design appears (and it will), the prediction is realized.
Ever heard of geostationary satellites?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I notice similaraties with Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age'... You say Carbon Nanotube based memory chip... He calls it rod logic, but it's clearly the same thing
Just wait until we get some vacuum-filled buckyballs and some useful nano-power sourde.
The diamond age is about to begin.
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
Smart skins would have been nice this morning when some jerk backed into my car and didn't bother to leave a note...
Another potential use for nanotubes are the traces on semiconductors:
I've seen a presentation from Infineon about using carbon nanotubes instead of copper for the vias in copper - time frame for production 3-5 years.
http://www.eurosime.com/bgnd.htm#es03
It seems Nantero has taken a "hint" from IBM by trying to beat them to the punch.
Wired had an article in April of 2000 on a technology called MRAM being developed by Stuart Parkin at IBM. Very interesting stuff, and they had working prototypes before this Nantero thing. From what I can tell, Nantero probably read the same article I did, as the similarities are quite remarkable.
Check it out: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/mram.html
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)
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
There's an article on the Register outlining the UK Governments proposed investment of £90m (GBP) in nanotechnology over the next six years here. With links to the announcement on the Government News Network. A very little too late perhaps.
http://www.colossalstorage.net/eloy_3c.gif
ferroelectric nanotubes
"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.
While the strength inherent in the mithril is a component in resisting spear thrusts, it is in fact the Elfish magic that the armor has been imbued with that absorbs and dissipates the force of the blow. This is also the major factor in the delicious nature of Keebler cookies, which are also Elfish.
Excellent read - although I have now decided to freeze myself for thawing in about 200 years.
iPod.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
That was in the Sourcebook Fields of Fire for the Shadowrun RPG. (and a damn fine gaming system it is too.)
The bulletproof clothing felt like gel when worn under normal conditions, but when subjected to a shockwave from a projectile or blast moving at or above the speed of sound it would harden into a bodycast of the wearer. After the shock had passed around the wearer, the armour would return to its fluid state. It was available in two models - the original bodysuit which made the wearer immobile until it had re-liquified, and the second-gen stuff which only hardened in the places hit.
The failure mode for a bad roll of the dice when defending against automatic weapons fire would the irreversible hardening of the suit into a permanent cast of the wearer.
A GM I played with allowed one of my teammates to take out a NPC wearing the armour with subsonic silenced rounds. Likewise, knives and arrows passed through it with no side effects other than releasing a vile poisonous goo from the punctured armour straight into the entry wound.
After that the remaining NPC Mercs wore kevlar and ceramic plates over their goo suits.
Current offensive frag grenades use a winding of fine brittle wire to make the fragments. On hard ground these tiny staple like projectiles can shred a man three meters away and wound him at ten.
What would a grenade made with a carbon nanotube casing with roving which would shatter into billions of tiny X-ray invisible fragments do? and would the carbon fragments even raise an immune response from the body? or would they be allowed to sit there with no symptoms until they moved one day years later to puncture an artery?
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