Nanothermometer Withstands Heat

StyleChief writes "Technology Review reports that researchers from the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) have fashioned nano thermometers from a magnesium oxide nanotube filled with liquid gallium. The tiny thermometers are between 20 and 60 nanometers thick, or about one hundredth the diameter of a red blood cell."

Comments

Could solve a long-standing hardware problem

[Mr. Darl McBride]

One of the major modes of failure in modern hard drives is in unevenness in platters causing irregularities in thermal distribution. The platter warps and eventually crash against the read/write head. (This isn't a significant bend, even a single micrometer of travel is sufficient for catastrophic failure with a high-density storage device.)

If these could actually be embedded radially about the platters, this kind of thermal differential failure could be detected. While this wouldn't solve the warping problem, it would at least cue the drive that it should run at a slower RPM and fire off non-stop SMART warnings to the system administrator, warning of catastrophe months or even a year ahead, instead of the current very short mechanical warning predictions which SMART-enabled devices offer.

Why so complicated?

[Ignis Flatus]

nano thermometers from a magnesium oxide nanotube filled with liquid gallium

And you still have to build interface hardware/circuitry to read the tiny things. Why can't they just keep it simple and bond two dissimilar metals together to make a thermocouple junction? Thermocouples have a wide temperature range, too.