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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."
last I heard, MIT was working on something like this. Just a rumor - can anyone verify?
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Hmmm, isn't this just what we need to make space elevators possible?
Ceramic brakes have been used for a pretty long time on racecars. IIRC at least since the early 90'ies. During night races (e.g. Le Mans 24 h) you can see how the brake discs glow red when they brake into the corners.
At the moment, "self assembling" means that we don't have to push the nanodots together after we make them. That's all. You still need to ablate a carefully prepared target with a laser to etch the structures we want.
Personally, I'm excited about their solid state lighting idea.
from the article The most interesting application may be the development of energy-efficient, low-cost, solid-state lighting. By creating a matrix of layers of varying sizes of nanodots embedded in a transparent medium such as aluminum oxide, Narayan can create a chip that glows with white light. Solid-state lighting would use about one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years.
Looks like my LCD monitor is about to become obsolete: there's no reason why these solid state can't be made the size of a pixel and tied to active matrix display electronics. Maybe the us military might be able to replace their $30,000+ individual soldier helmet monocles which are currently using 5000 hour MTBF organic led technology with durable, bright and efficient nano-leds and save taxpayer money while we're at it.
The OP means that this guy gets a number of stories posted every week, all containing links to (amongst other things) his blog.
That's rubbing a fair few people here up the wrong way, and personally I'm not surprised. Slashdot gets so many submissions from so many people, that to have so many accepted by the same person seems a little odd, especially given he always promotes his own site in them. Starts to feel like advertising...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Trust me, it's been going on for way more than the last week. Somehow Piquepaille has managed to average 1 story every 2-3 days for the past 6 months or more. I don't know how he does it. Kickbacks to the /. editors maybe?
They have vaccuum inside, and they're diamond, so they're strong enough to handle the pressure. So, they end up being diamonds that float in our atmosphere.
You'd probably need a good few layers of carbon atoms to make sure no oxygen, nitrogen or even hydrogen atoms sneaked in. Not forgetting the byproducts of cosmic rays. My guess is that the total mass of the casing / volume would exceed the density of the surrounding air.
Buckminster Fuller has a similar idea, but on a much grander scale. He figured you could could create floating cities from ordinary steel. If you could imagine a geodesic polyhedron 2 miles in radius with steel pipes 2-3 metres in radius for the edges, the force exerted by raising the air temperature inside the pipes by just a couple of degrees would be enough to make the structure float in the air.
The closest real-world implementation at present is a nyoln fibre airship, with helium gas for lift. Roughly, you get 1 Kg of lift for every cubic metre of Helium. For a 6x2 metre airship with 25 cubic metres, the weight of the skin is around 8 Kg, when inflated, and 25kg of lifting weight.
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