Slashdot Mirror
Futuristic 'Smart' Yarns from Carbon Nanotubes
neutron_p writes "Scientists at The UTD NanoTech Institute achieved a major technological breakthrough by spinning multi-walled carbon nanotube yarns that are strong, tough and extremely flexible, and are both electrically and thermally conducting. Among other things, the futuristic yarns could result in 'smart' clothing that stores electricity, provides ballistic protection and adjusts temperature and porosity to provide greater comfort. The breakthrough, made possible by, in effect, downsizing ancient technology used for wool and cotton spinning to the nanoscale, resulted from an unusual collaboration involving nanotechnologists and experts in wool spinning."
Does this mean that grandma can now knit me a bullet proof vest?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
and now they come out with this. I knew I should have waited.
Sweet informative mod.
Now we can get to work on spinning the belt for the space elevator.
"Are you wearing one of them new carbon-acrylic dockers? Or are you just happy to see me?" :)
Lets see it will be silver, one piece and one size fits all.
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
the chastity thong, a secure impenetrable and fashionable undergarment for young ladies concerned about fashion, and fathers concerned about young men.
from the typing-too-fast dept
...does it repel stains?
This kind of technology is not only useful in helping you wear your computer, which seems to be today's fetiche of every geek. Although that is, indeed, attractive, let us think for a while about the advantages of being able to have such small conductors. For example, we can have super computers that are roughly the same size of today's desktops.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of nanocomputers inside your ATX case, and then you'll see what's a really good fetiche. It might even run Longhorn with Doom 3 and Duke Nukem Forever on dual monitors!
Am I the only one who thought of Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke when reading this?
For those that don't know, Foutains of Paradise is where ACC first coined the idea of building an elevator into space which he later used in 3001: A Final Odyssey (The 3rd sequal to 2001: A Space Odyssey). To build the elevator a super-strength carbon string was bundled into three bundles and then attached to a giant mass in space to keep the tethers taught. At least if memory serves me correctly that's how it was done. If you're an ACC fan and haven't read Fountains of Paradise, I recommend it.
:wq
I have always been fascinated by them that they have so many incredible applications and multiwalled carbon nanotubes is just one of its many possible ways of using it.
Screw smart clothes... Hopefully this stuff can be made into next generation pressurised (200-300 atm) rocket fuel tanks. No turbopumps, reliable pressure fed engines without weight penalty in bulky tanks and cheap RLV is one important step closer to reality.
I first read this as "Futuristic Smart Yams from Carbon Nanotubes." If ever any overlords ever needed welcoming, it'd be Smart Yam overlords. I wouldn't have to be the one to explain about Thanksgivings past. Hopefully they wouldn't demand to eat one human for every yam ever consumed...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I, for one, welcome our new itchy sweater-wearing overlords.
"Smart clothes," feh. Wake me up when they've developed mimetic polycarbon.
That's just in time (or just a bit too late?) to save many a developed country's ass - if I'm not mistaken in 2005 WTO members must abolish textile quotas and Chinese and Indian manufacturers are poised to make a killing.
Products based on this technology will command premium prices (and have great features - I might finally become interested in shopping!).
In Ontario, Canada the guvmnt wants to declare bullet proof vests against the law, just like weapons. Will clothes that provide ballistic protection as well as a range of other great features be against the law? I want my bullet-proof underwear, god-damnit!
You can't handle the truth.
But all that being said, what I want to see most is clothing that you can change the appearance of (color, pattern, even cut, if possible) at will. Not because I particularly want it, mind you, but because I'm quite certain that that's the feature that will drive adoption of this in the consumer space, which is what will cause all the actually cool applications to be available.
Viva fashion, and whatnot.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
"The breakthrough, made possible by, in effect, downsizing ancient technology used for wool and cotton spinning to the nanoscale, resulted from an unusual collaboration involving nanotechnologists and experts in wool spinning."
Now just think what the car makers can learn from the buggy whip people?
Is this "smart" yarn smart enough to stop people from wearing lime green paisley sweaters?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I would not get my hopes up for getting a carbon nanotube sweater for Christmas this year or next year or the year after that... In the foreseeable future these nanotube yarns would be used to replace metal wires in applications where increased flexibility and pliability are required they could also be used for such things as capacitors or batteries. The authors of the article (Mei Zhang, Ken R. Atkinson and Ray H. Baughman, Science, 306, 5700, p1358-1361, 19 November 2004) state that the small yarn diameters (about 20 micrometers for the four ply yarn), could eliminate the uncomfortable rigidity sometimes found for metal wire-containing conducting textiles that provide radio or microwave absorption, electrostatic discharge protection, textile heating, or wiring for electronic devices. Although a bulletproof, electrically conductive vest that could withstand temperature extremes from +450C to -196C does sound quite appealing.
"When Nature Calls We All Shall Drown" Johan Edlund
Comes textile-punk, to be featured in Neal Stephenson's upcoming book, Sweater Crash. Meanwhile, the Wachowski brothers have a new movie in the making about about a futuristic society where all of humanity is entrapped in a large, controlling single piece of nano-fabric. Of course, this was all done 50 years ago in an Asimov book.
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
The link is kind of crappy. It's sort of hype-ish without real science, which coincidentally is the name of the journal whose latest issue is mentioned in the link as containing the paper describing the breakthrough. What a sentence that was...anyways, here you go. You should be able to read it even if you aren't at a subscribing institution since it's the latest issue.
It's worth noting that UTD has only been hard at work in CNT research for a few years. I was there in 2002 when the NanoTech institute was still being built. They had a bunch of Dells sitting outside the building with no one watching...but I guess they didn't worry. I mean, who steals a Dell?
Other good links, mostly culled from the above Science article:
Baughman's summary of nanotube work
Smalley (the Nobel prize winner) and his CNT work:: He invented the HiPCO process for large-scale development of CNT's...from what I gather, fiber-spinning like the UTD method is a direct competitor.
A really good (and 46 page!) discussion of nanotube work
Strong Bad, in case you get tired of science.
Now, as can be demonstrated by many of my previous posts, I'm all for pure and applied science. However, lately, I've been thinking quite a lot on the question "what good is technology?". Yes, building a space elevator would be cool. Yes, having light bulletproof vests would be cool. But how does this science help mankind? Does it improve agriculture? Does it help provide things people need? Does it help the environment? Does it help people get along better?
I know these are questions that don't have easy answers always, and I know that if people thought about these things in a literal sense then we probably would not have a lot of the technology we currently have.
My question is more of this: what research is being done into pure sciences and technology that does work for agriculture, health, the environment, and those types of things directly. Some technology simply supports those things indirectly by providing jobs, new materials, etc.
What is lacking in a lot of science, though, and much of life in general, is a lack of focus. Even in the pure sciences, what's the goal of a particular project? Sometimes it's "to see how things work". Sometimes it's "we would like a better way to do X". There is no overarching goal for a lot of modern technology though - mostly it's just "we want a profit!" (Reminds me of the line from Star Trek: First Contact where Zefram Cochrane says he wasn't in it for science but for profit!)
I am by most measures a successful person, but I've had to ask myself: what good is it? Not from a depressed standpoint, but a "shouldn't I be doing more?" standpoint. Carbon nanotubes are great, but what do they really give us? The list goes on - what do Linux desktops give us? MP3 players (without DRM, of course!)? Wi-Fi? These are all neat things - but do we have a purpose behind our technical passions?
</soapbox>
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
yeah, cause i know my wife has to be careful not to get any nasty black stuff on her from her diamond ring....
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
You could ask the same question of diamond. It's all about the structure. If I remember a little piece from high school chemistry correctly, graphite's molecular structure is one of weakly bonded layers (I want to say that the layers are a hexagonal lattice, but I don't recall exactly) that are essentiallly scraped off in applications such as pencils.
And I guess you were trying to be funny, which you were, but sometimes sarcastic tone doesn't travel well through text. Ah, well. Gave me a chance to flaunt my high school education.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
I hope it comes with a grounding strap.
I wonder if this would be a good material for microsurgical sutures.
And now, we can construct the world's smallest violin for Ron Artest.
sigs, as if you care.
How long is it? Lots of nanotube work has been done before, but at microscopic lengths. Nanotubes won't be practical for anything until they can be made at a useful size.
This may be a really stupid question. Related to a recent study concerning the replacements for asbestos. Back in the 80:ies when it was discovered that asbestos would cause lung-cancer or worse after repeated exposion to it, they replaced asbestos rather swiftly with materials like cheramic fibres. Now, recently they discovered that replacements like heat-resistant cheramics could also cause lung-cancer this. Perhaps just as dangerous as asbestos. The reason found, was because of the micro-fragments (dust) which would gather in the lungs and it's air-sacks (alveoli) and make them to swell abnormally and then risk causing cancer.
Even building insolation materials have also been questioned.
Now to my concern regarding carbon fibre.. has there been any studies on carbon tubes's affects on the human body? Carbon-fibre is an artificial material such as many insolations questioned. That is why I ask.
Ten years, twenty years or more from now, will we notice the dangerious side-affects of materials we push out on the market?
Maybe you could use this to create overlapping grids of nanoscale photoelectric cells and LEDs or similar, and create the effect of light being passed through your body to the other side... if not making you completely invisible, at least sort of ghostly or insubstantial-seeming. Or, alternately, an effect of reflecting all light that hits you, or any number of visual effects. Sort of like a walking Photoshop.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
So this is what the Incredable's suits are made out of... isn't it daaaaaahling!
Eventually, we'll need thread for nanosurgical sutures.
Farmers everywhere would appreciate weatherproof, pest-proof grain bins that breathe, but don't ever explode.
If you can't get along with someone when you're both in bullet-proof underwear, you each deserve what you get. (Not sure I believe that, but it's worth thinking about anyway)
Thin, strong twine could make for improved saws. A razor-thin ultrastrong wire with handles or a bow could slice through anything from a steel bar to a loaf of bread. The trick will be figuring out to make a band-saw shaped one.
Then again, consider how easy a thread of this stuff would be to smuggle into prison.
sigs, as if you care.
Carbon nanotubules have not been rigourously studied for health affects on humans. However, the same chemical attributes that make asbestos so toxic are not found in CNT's. In fact the affect of breathing in CNT's would be most like breathing in carbon soot. In fact, buckey balls and carbon fullerenes do exist naturally in soot. In short, CNT's are not thought to have especially toxic properties, but more studies are being performed.
Apparently someone has already done some testing and concluded these things are extermely TOXIC. Clothing and other every-day things made of this stuff? You go first. OTOH, it might be just fine encased in resin. Carbon-nanotube-fiber constuction could be fantastic for everyone except the people who actually make the stuff...
Somehow I have a feeling the ultrafine fiber fragments shed by these yarns or fabrics made from them with age and wear won't be so happy biologically.
Generally small particles or fillaments of any material smaller than a certain size are bad for you if inhaled (i.e. Pneumoconiosis), regardless of their composition.
Additionally, if fiber fragments are short and fine enough, you essentially have little needle-like objects that can do a lot of damage directly at the cellular level.
So, not that I'm being pessimistic or anything, but in the long term I don't think it'll remain an everyday item. It might hit the open market for a while, but a few decades of cancer studies, toxicoligical studies and lawsuits would likely bring an end to that.
While my guesses are just that, there are a few discouraging signs in research to date. Watch this area; we'll see whether further results warrant concern or not.
To be clear, I think this technology should certainly be pursued, but we need to be guarded in our optimisim regarding its widespread applicability.
DNA just wants to be free...
and extremely flexible, and are both electrically and thermally conducting.
Eh hem, everybody remember what happens to steel wool when you hook it up to a 9 volt battery in science class?
Okay, if the handkerchief's in the left pocket s/he's AC, and the right pocket for DC...or was it the other way around?...
[BZZZAP!]
Damn.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
If yams can cook, so can stew.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Great, so we won't get lung cancer, only black lung disease. I think I will just keep with smoking my cigarettes while working in a coal mine thank you.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
This was posted in March and July See http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/1 2/1443253&tid=14 http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/0 8/1425203&tid=126&tid=14
The first airplanes, in particular, were often made with cloth stretched over a wooden or metal frame.
DNA just wants to be free...
No shit, there I was, making some chainmail at my boring security desk job at Carbon Nanotechnologies, when suddenly ...
...because these tinfoil underpants are getting seriously uncomfortable!
"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."
No photographs please.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
between the textile industry and computing industry... In the late 60s, before bipolar transistor memory or MOS transistor memories were commonplace and practical, companies like Digital and IBM employed several textile company weaving-experts on the efficient weaving of core memory "ropes" and "cloths." Basically, the problems encountered in the fabrication of core memory on a large, complex scale had been solved, or at least examined, centuries before. see Rope memory and Apollo Guidance Computer rope memory. And of course, who could forget the original programmed computer, the Jacquard's punch-card loom?