Slashdot Mirror
New Technique for Creating Nanotube Sheets
Quetzalcoatl writes "A team of researchers has come up with a way to make strong, stable sheets of multiwall nanotubes at a rate of seven meters per minute. These sheets already display a number of remarkable qualities that lend them to many different applications, including artificial muscles, transparent antennas, video displays and solar cells."
Dupe.
You mean this is a strong, thin, substance? Why couldn't we put a layer of this on the space shuttle to be pulled off after in orbit, to protect the hundreds of tiles that enable her to reenter the atmosphere. Why can't we put a bunch of two by fours between the shuttle and the external tank holding a screen of these to make sure that foam falling off doesn't hit the shuttle.... Why can't we just wrap the external tank in this to make sure foam doesn't fall off and hit the shuttle. I got shut down suggesting such a thing to prevent foam hitting the shuttle, with the article...I ask again....why not? We spend sooo much money on the shuttle anyways, why is this such a bad idea to implement? I want the 3 remaining shuttles and all their crews to come back home as much as anyone!!! At least till we implement a 21st century vehicle!!!
Dupe (of someone pointing out that there will be dupes of comments pointing out that this is a dupe article)
No Flash Photography of the nanotubes please.
They will explode.Two Roommates and a Boyfriend, updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
you fail it (it is not duping a comment pointing out that this is a dupe story)
Remember: the number of roots of a polynomial is equal to its order.
Now our soldiers can have shortages of nanotube underwear - yay! Nanotube condoms anybody?
"The server's on fire!
It's more than I can handle"
Jeez...there's what.. (looks at file size) a 6.7MB video of this?
And it's a dupe!
Bravo! I genuflect in the direction of Slashdot, honoring its unlimited power to bring fear and loathing into the hearts of system administrators everywhere!
--
BMO ++ ATH0 NO CARRIER
I don't care. My Karma Is Bigger Than Yours
This has been covered on /. a lot, but nonetheless, I still want to see these artificial materials given 'smart' qualities. Like the example I gave previously, such as superconducting cords that detangle themselves and melt down and allow you to pour it through where you want it and it reforms itself.
Even if that doesn't happen, I wouldn't be suprised if we get our first superconductors from methods like this.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I am so using that to tape my hockey stick...
Time to put tags on stories and search that in addition to links (there have been numerous dupes with same links). If the tags are on, then pull up all the past stories starting with the most recent. This is not a hard thing to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
duh. LiftPort and they're responsible for most of the nanotube based materials production that is going on right now. The key point about developing any new technology is the spinoffs. They tend to make more money than the target use. Especially in the case of space technology.
How we know is more important than what we know.
With one of these babys it would only take 26245.00978 years to have at least part of your 60,000mi. space elevator! Consider it a long-term investment? Where do I signup!?
Great that this innovation is made in USA. Although we have our problems, we are still capable of making ground-breaking discoveries.
I don't understand potential applications, but if the physicists/material-sci people are saying it is great, I guess it is really great.
Somehow, though, I fear it will get commercialized first in Japan, and then rapidly the Chinese will be making money off the stuff.
46 hours and 34 minutes, surely this has got to be getting close to a duping record
when they have it in 2 ply, 1000 sheet rolls that fit on my toilet paper spool, then maybe i'll be interested.
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
Blackmailing sysadmin with threat of slashdotting - $10,000
Posting the article twice after he pays up - Priceless
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
(But maybe your nanopenis isn't curable..?)
It's amazing what science is doing nowadays. First we're applauding the efforts of one group's efforts to create a new technique to make nanotube sheets, and only a few days later a NEW technique comes by! Fantastic!
Good-Tutorials
How about this:
Instead of whining about it being a dupe. Just don't read the article. What a concept.
"Instead of whining about it being a dupe. Just don't read the article. What a concept"
But you don't know it's a dupe until you RTFA, and by then it's far too late. It's like when Laurie Anderson says about what you do in the morning when you eat your cereal, and you're just staring at the box reading...reading and eating, and then you discover that what you've been eating what you're reading.
And then it really _is_ too late.
Here's a concept: stop wasting my time with your concepts.
--
BMO
Well thinking of the noteworthyness of this article it qualifies easely for duping :]
:)
(will probably be a 'cool stuff to do with nanotubes' section on slashdot around this time next year, enjoy )
Wow, I think you have a decimal point mistake there! It's more like 26.245.... years.
Reading the article? Hum, that would be a concept. I thought this was just a place to put unrelated comments.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
I appreciate your effort to oust CmdrTaco as the #1 dupe poster, but this simple first-step is but a small part of a journey. CmdrTaco has done this for far longer than you.
He has also duped himself more than once, something you'll have to master before dethroning him.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
2 new methods in as many days? We can't be far from a space elevator now!
And next dupe about that will come from piquepille. I can see that already:
"Are you amazed at how nanotubes _are_ produced? See _brief_ article for more details".
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
"2000 posts pointing out how this is a dupe. :/"
Amusingly, nobody checks to see if a comment on it being a dupe already exists before they rush to the reply button.
"Derp de derp."
What they don't tell you is that the outraged comments by slashdotters with nothing better to do on a Saturday/Sunday is what powers the nanotube machine.
Tricksy scientists, we hates them we do.
"Cue dupes of this comment pointing out that you don't know the difference between "cue" and "queue"."
In this context, the difference between those two words isn't all that significant. But, hey, if you're going to overzealously nitpick somebody's post because they're pointing out the silliness of your views, I guess you'll take what you can get.
"Derp de derp."
Slashdot invents new way to duplicate nanotubes!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
But you don't know it's a dupe until you RTFA
Maybe you don't, but I can figure it out from the title...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Even less since it's not a 60,000 mile space elevator, more like 60,000 km. So only 17 years.
Show me a man who can joke about small penises and link to his wife's blog in the same post and I'll show you a man who knows no fear.
Blank until
... monofilament "splendid cheese cutter"[1].
And please refrain from modding me Funny. I am in fact serious: All this nano-research is fine and dandy, but it really doesn't _do_ much for us until actual products emerges on the consumer market. "us" being you and me, as opposed to science and nano-technology research(ers).
In all sincerety, it would be great to see infinitely sharp and durable cheese cutters, or full-body workclothes that are strong and light, or, for that matter, that fabled space elevator. We are, after all, living in the (also-fabled) 21st century.
______
[1] Arthur C. Clarke, "Foundations of Paradise" p.53 (ISBN 0446677949)
"Good news, everyone!"
Anyone still remembers Scotty talking about transparaent aluminium? This seems to be very close...
PBS Nova is offering online playback of a really neat series called Science Now.
The second episode included a neat profie of researcher Naomi Halas who studies nanoshells -- spheres rather than tubes. One potential appication is as a treatment for cancer.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
And get 17 along side each other each making a segment and it'd only take 1 year.
I saw this and it made me reminisce about Bill Joy's essay http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
"Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." This is the kind of tech that makes me think the future might not only not need us but might want to tidily get us out of the way while it's at it.
This is cool stuff but every instance of this stuff should be registered like a lethal weapon and accounted for and contained in class-4 biocontainment before we figure out how we can learn how to safely get rid of this stuff after we are done with it.
In the article, they concerned themselves with the problems of degraded nano particulate floating around and causing problems. Sure, nano dust could cause people to have more asthma or worse, but on the macro scale the potential for problems are apparant too...
One of the things that concerns me is huge almost invisible ribbons or sails of this stuff floating around in our oceans or in our atmosphere trapping and killing fish, whales, birds, and 747's.
Have you walked along the coast of an ocean beach lately? You cannot walk for 2 meters near the high tide line on just about any beech (u.s. mainland) without finding near-indistructable plastic fishing nets or some other human waste. We make our bed we sleep in it.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Is the softball-sized device in the video really the entire manufacturing "factory"? What's the feedstock, and how is power supplied?
Imagine a gang of ribbon robots (ribbots?) in Solar orbit, each with a tank of feedstock. They roll their ribbons out from a central equipment cluster towards a circumference 10Km away. The whole rig is spinning, the "centrifugal force" keeping the ribbons straight towards the circular rim. Pairs of magnetically linked ribbots literally weave ribbons around the ribbon spokes, just like spiders weaving their webs, welding paths around the center to the spokes. Now there's a 300Km^2 circle, weighing 10tons collecting 4TW of uninterrupted solar energy.
Even if this film is only a little better at photoelectrics than current PVs, that's over 1TW, the entire US electrical consumption. Put two up there, mount a soviet-style maser array (98% efficiency) pointed at a relay platform floating out in the Pacific. We can recycle all our power plants, coal mines, and petroleum "allies" into national parks or shopping malls (I know which one I'd convert the nuke plants to).
If we float the "PowerWeb" in Solar orbit closer to the Sun, we don't even need as large an area: halfway to the Sun gets 4x the power, over 5KW:m^2. OTOH, since the material is so strong, light (and maybe cheap), we can make them really big, without worrying too much about shear and ripple forces tearing the web. If we put a couple dozen of them floating around the Solar System, maybe in some concentric rings vertical to the ecliptic, we could install a power grid for exploration and colonization of our entire Solar System. A "light rail" capturing Solar energy, and beaming it against a fleet of solar sails, shuttling crews and cargo around. All at the speed of the original Age of Sail, except a few weeks could get us around from Earth thru Neptune - mere days for unmanned craft at >1G.
And this is just the first generation of the tech. Both the material and the factory will get smaller, lighter, cheaper, better. I just hope the American vision of scientific exploration proves worthy of the promise of this stuff. Because I'd hate to switch paying my power bills from Saudi Oil to Chinese Electric.
--
make install -not war
You say the difference between the inside and outside foam can reach ~100kelvin.
Weed may screw my memory up at times, but I'm sure kelvin is exactly the same as celsius, except it starts at a different offset (i.e. to save people saying "minus 273 celsius" all the time, they simply say it's "0 kelvin").
Nobody I know ever uses kelvin to state a temperature so I'm a little confused; is a difference of 100K actually any different to a difference of 100C?
You guys just love jumping to conclusions, don't ya? I bet even after I post this, there will still be comments about "duping" to follow. You see, off the bat ya gotta realize that this article says multiwalled nanotubes -- usually it's just "carbon nanotube sheets", giving the idea it's two-sided like a sheet of aluminum foil. Moreover, it doesn't say they created the strongest nanotubes, but rather a new and faster way of developing them.
...to post some cool links. Here's Nature's Quicktime video of the sheets being produced (coral cache).
8 15/full/050815-8.html
t a-utd081505.php
http://www.nature.com.nyud.net:8090/news/2005/050
And the official press release from UT Dallas...
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/uo
Nanotube condoms are for little pussys.
BA-DUM-TSSSHHH!
The name of the material you are looking for is "thin edge". It comes from an Analog story of the same name published, I believe, in the 1970s.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
These sheets have about 14T nanotubes per m^2, or lines of 4M tubes per meter - thats a 250nm "process" of nanotubes. If each tube can be made a pixel (maybe tagging it with an organic group, for OLED), that's 100K dpi. And likely not on a perfect rectangular "grid" like today's 25dpi LCD monitors, but rather in an "organic" texture like the surfaces of actual objects we see. 10Gpixels per square inch - where are my VR contact lenses?
--
make install -not war
Maybe a premature announcement to get additional funding for a project that's still decades away from seeing results, I dunno... but something about this just screams "cold fusion" to me, and I don't think we'll ever see it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have a feeling that nanotube cuts will be dramatic compared to good old paper cuts.
---
Nano nano
Mork
I can understand the editors' decision to dupe stories based on the fact that many people may have missed them first time around. But perhaps a better idea would be for people to rate the importance of a story, and then have the story to float around the top for longer if it's important enough.
Based on this same idea, people can filter out stories which are above a certain threshold of importance.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Does anyone know if this stuff is biodegradable?
I'm sure that it takes a while for the machine to move from the staging area to the physical pad, then you need to load the fuel, which takes a while to say the least.
m l
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/facilities/tour.html
And
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/facilities/crawler.ht
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Instead of whining about people whining about dupes, why not just not read the comments of people whining about the dupes?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm glad an article about such an interesting discovery got duped, because I missed the first one.
Willy
why stop there? get 6205 of them and be done in a day. or get 148920 of them and be done in an hour.
the fact that this article is a dupe is far less annoying than all of the comments pointing that fact out.
So why not make a "dupes" department you could filter out & add all dupes and newly discovered dupes to it as they come through?
Oh, right, it would be kinda freaky seeing all the stories filtered out on the main page...
Does anyone know if this stuff is biodegradable?
... that's why we will need to manufacture tailored micro-organisms, themselves constructed of nanotubes, to digest nano-refuse.
I'm guessing not biodegradable
-kgj
-kgj
I have a feeling that nanotube cuts will be dramatic compared to good old paper cuts.
Sure, but you'll be able to buy a nanotube bandage for that cut -- stops the bleeding, and bulletproof too!
-kgj
-kgj
Even if this film is only a little better at photoelectrics than current PVs, that's over 1TW, the entire US electrical consumption. Put two up there, mount a soviet-style maser array (98% efficiency) pointed at a relay platform floating out in the Pacific.
... or Beijing ... or wherever ....
I admire your vision. But I'm afraid that orbital maser arrays will more likely be pointed at Riyadh
-kgj
-kgj
I love the way they placed the UT Dallas logo right along the track of the camera and made sure to track slowly back over it again.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
q: Does anyone know if this stuff is biodegradable?
a: Neither is your BBQ charcoal!
That's why we need bacterial phages tailored to digest charcoal briquettes.
Plus, I'd like another martini, please design bacteria tailored to excrete top-shelf liquor.
-kgj
-kgj
Geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 KM, where you'd place your station.
;).
At 7 meters/minute, it's right around 10KM a day.
5112285 Minutes.
85204 Hours
3550 Days
9.73 Years. You can have two machines working, one dropping cable, one releasing cable to a higher orbit(for balance).
I think they need to speed it up a bit
I don't read AC A human right
"I was watching the Superbowl with my 92 year old grandfather. The team scored a touchdown. They showed the instant replay. He thought they scored another one. I was gonna tell him, but I figured the game he was watching was better."
--Steven Wright
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
In Soviet Russia, ScuttleMonkey dupes YOU!
In the Ringworld trilogy, the Ringworld had an inner ring of opaque panels with spaces between, held together by a super strong fiber made (IIRC) of nothing but neutrons. This fiber could cut through any ordinary matter like it was a gas. It was, indeed, very dangerous. Even touching it could result in major injury or loss of body parts, because it would cut through you without enough pressure for you to feel it.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/