Slashdot Mirror
Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures
Roland Piquepaille writes "Chips holding 10 terabits of data? Copper as strong as steel? Ceramics tough enough to be used in car engines? All this will be true in five years, thanks to two new methods to create self-assembling 3D nanostructures. These methods used pulsed laser deposition to create layers of nanodots organized in a matrix. These arrays of nanodots are consistent in shape and size -- 7 nanometers with nickel for example. But the real beauty of these methods is that they can be applied to almost any material, like nickel for data storage or aluminum oxide for ceramics. These methods also reduce drastically imperfections, leading to future superstrong materials. Read more here for other details and an image of a single nickel nanocrystal, or nanodot."
You build nanomachines that turn people into gray goo, obviously.
Another Slashdot story that is going to change my life. Why is it after 3 years I'm still doing the same stinking job, same stinking money eh?
/. to change your life? The .com boom is over, get over it. Find a job you enjoy, or one you can stand. Then, to enjoy yourself, get a life. It's amazing how unimportant work is once you have a kid.
Maybe because you expect
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I second that, just link straight to the story.
Everything in moderation, even moderation.
No, especially moderation.
Please read the previous sentence for as many thousand times as needed for you to fully understand it.
> 'chip-light using' one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years
Well that puts LCD back in the race against the upcoming OLED technology. If they can further reduce bad pixels and failure it may be more environmentally friendly than OLED which may have a shorter life span. The energy used by the backlight was LCDs culprit, with that solved LCD may become our long lasting friend.
OLED pushers better speed their cheap display printing tech to market before we expect displays to last 40 years.
--
Dennis SCP
You say not to click on any of the links but don't provide any alternate links for us to click. How are we to RTFA if we don't get any links..... oh wait. Sorry, I forgot where I was momentarily.
Sounds extremely over-optimistic to me.
Ceramics in engines to me means no cooling needed. A engine that can be heated to 2000 degrees without cracking would save alot of energy and polution.
Hey slashdot: if someone puts the word nano in front of a sentence it does not mean the material is instantly going to build your nerdy wet dream of a space elevator, coming to take you away from your sad little cubicle/hand jobs.
More nano hype. It's published in a crappy journal, and he's got nanoparticles to assemble into a lattice, which they've been doing now for, ooh >5 years? Suitably stabilized Nanoparticles do this anyway, it's called CLOSE PACKING and should be familiar to anyone with a modicum of HS chem.
I have to say, it's a nice trick with the laser ablation though - it generalises exisitng nanoparticle positioning/assembly to a few new materials.
Revolutionary it ain't.
See
http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/~pagrp/
and
http://www.ncsu.edu/chemistry/dlf.html
amongst many many others for better science.
'Nonymous nanotechnologist.
No. Carbon nanotubes are what you want for that. But we need better production.
OTOH, this might be jim dandy for the electrical connections. (Might, because I'm not sure how well it conducts electricity, or what conducting electricity does to it's strength.) It's obviously desireable to minimize the parasitic weight that the elevator contains in its lift cable.
P.S.: To me it seems a poor idea to go directly to a Space Elevator. Starting with an easier design might well be better, say with a pinwheel. You need to fly up to catch the rotating arm, but not too high, and by doing things that way you don't need quite as strong a cable. (You don't even need to do it from a geo-stationary orbit, but you would need to be high enough so that progression is rather sedate. Say, once every 6 hours...and build four of them for less than the price of one in geostationary orbit. (You do need to have the arms reach down far enough to hook the cargo-bay off the plane...say 10 miles up? I didn't look up how high planes can reasonably fly, or what the air resistance is at that height, so that a wild ass guess [WAG].)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.