Slashdot Mirror
Single Nanotube Becomes World's Smallest Radio
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "Researchers at the National Science Foundation have utilized a single carbon nanotube to perform all the functions of a standard radio, acting as an antenna, tunable filter, amplifier, and demodulator. They were then able to tune in a radio signal generated in the room and play it back through an attached speaker. The device is functional across a bandwidth widely used for commercial radio. From the NSF: 'The source content for the first laboratory test of the radio was "Layla," by Derek and the Dominos, followed soon after by "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys.'"
The Apple iTube. Don't buy just one, buy the whole series.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
When a single nanotube can cut out the commercials on my FM radio- THATS when I will get excited.
At that scale, you can actually see the radio waves...
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
We're they paying royalties to the RIAA? RIAA vs. NSF coming soon to a Federal Court near you.
What's next?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
the day mankind gave the gift of Howard Stern and American Top 40 and the traffic report to bacteria
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We're gonna need a bigger tin-foil hat.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...on people losing these things. "Damnit, where's my radio? Did I lose it again!? Oh wait here it is... no... that's pocket lint."
I really do love the analogies we use to describe quantum-mechanical or relativistic behavior. Even the best ones start off comprehensible but rapidly morph into the deranged land of our most cheese-fuelled nightmares.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Perfoming rights organizations, BMI and ASCAP, want a fee for every carbon nanotube sold.
Their project page has videos, simulations, and audio playback samples: NSF Nanotube Radio
Here is their journal abstract:
"We have constructed a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver from a single carbon nanotube. The nanotube serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio: antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator. A direct current voltage source, as supplied by a battery, powers the radio. Using carrier waves in the commercially relevant 40-400 MHz range and both frequency and amplitude modulation techniques, we demonstrate successful music and voice reception."
The radio is a single carbon nanotube, right?
It must be real difficult reading the display (or dial) to see what station you're tuned in to!!!! ;)
A nanotube version of the worlds smallest violin.
"The waves shown in this image were added for visual effect, and are not part of the original microscope image"
I'm glad they finally explained that at the bottom because I started checking if it was April fools or a parody site or something like that.
I guess it wasn't dramatic enough as is for the general public to get excited.
When the internet will be upped from normal tubes to nanotubes. Web 2.0 IS COMING!
...if these can be used in dentistry, as tooth fillings.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Now there will be great confusion about what "listening on radio over the Tubes" mean...
You know the Black Van that I mean, the one with the black tinted windows and a vanity plate on the front that says "Fearmobile".
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Wait...they broadcast Layla and Good Vibrations and admitted it publicly? Expect to hear from RIAA lawyers soon...
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
....Inanimate Carbon Rod!
I can't believe we've overlooked this week's winner for so very, very long.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
... I'm afraid "nano" is trademarked for audio devices ... please cease and desist in the use of this term in this connection ...
Unfortunately, it crossed my blood-brain barrier.
Thanks for the glioblastoma, slut.
This is actually smaller than the iPod Zepto: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2005/11/28fitch.html
will go to the figurehead artists, who put their name to some words and then drive their hybrid SUVs to their red carpet galas, leaving the poor, starving attorneys, accountants, and publicists to do the real work -- the licensing?
It's time to make a stand. We at the firm of Leech, Suxxor & Scabb are taking up the cause of starving parasuits everywhere.
We just want what's right.
We just want what's fair.
sigs, as if you care.
Goddamn Horton Hears A Who viral marketing!
so how big is the transmitter?
So, do nano-scale carbon tubes sound better than transistors?
Or, only if you use oxygen-free silver interconnects the size of a garden hose?
Chip H.
rapidly morph into the deranged land of our most cheese-fuelled nightmares
Now *that's* an interesting phobia.
Is that a nanotube radio in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
(Sorry, just had to...)
NSF funded the center, but the affiliation of the scientists is with Berkeley. NSF doesn't directly hire "researchers".
They will probably lower their prices big time:
http://www.nanocarbonsales.com/
http://www.cnanotech.com/pages/store/6-0_online_store.html
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
a receiver for radio that fits in my pores... you have no idea how long ive been waiting for this. Now we just have to wait to buy a thimble full of nano headphones to dump into our inner ear and we'll be set to listen to all the advertising and rush limbaugh the human mind can take.
King Kong Died For Your Sins
All hail the inanimate carbon rod^H^H^Hnanotube!
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
This new technology should lead to much easy and more comfortable forms of smuggling information and radios for spies everywhere. Very useful for number stations... from Good Vibrations to the Lincolnshire Poacher.
'Tiny Dancer' would have been a more logical choice.
In the 19th century they had pocket watches. Then watches got small enough to strap on your wrist. Then we got cell phones, threw away our wristwatches and put the phone in a pocket.
In the 19 century we had vacuum tubes. In the mid 20th century these were replaced by semiconductors, which were smaller and less bulky. Now we're back to tubes again, and the TFA sounds like these are kind of nano vacuum tubes, only without the vacuum.
The nanotube radio is likely like these geek toys nerds have been building since the early 1900s. All you need to build one is a diode, some wire, a piece of wood, and headphones to listen to it with. They used to call these things "catwhisker radios", the "cat whisker" being the diode.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why are we regressing back to 'tube radios?
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Spooks playing God/Allah/Jehovah/*.
Now hiring: Nano orphan children to sew nano radio covers and cases. Must have previous sweat shop experience.
Apple would still charge $299 for the device and claim its all in the development.
Apple's stock would then jump 800% and people might finally realize that they are getting charged for nothing but bit shifting.
And it would still only have one button.
If I only could +1 for the choice of music...
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
OK,
Your radio is nice, but can it transmit? imagine a world where the NSA sprinkles a little 'dust'
comprised of low wattage radios designed to link up, point to point they should cover the distance between all those
being listened to and those doing the listening.
paranoid? you bet.
the land that was free, the home of the braves.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Several patent trolls have threatened to sue, claiming the work violates over 200 of their top-secret patents ("Just because the device functions on a quantum scale is not enough to avoid licensing costs" one source was quoted.) The trolls have claimed that research like this, if allowed to continue, will stifle true innovation by their exclusive licensees.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Yeah, but Sheriff John Brunell says that if you buy the HD carbon nanotube for a bit more, you can get extra stations between the stations!
Comment of the year
Ah, where I come from it's assumed that if you eat a lot of cheese at night, you will have vivid dreams.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"Single carbon nanotube, is there nothing that you can't do?"
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I will finally be able to tune into Air America with my penis.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
They appear to be leaving the nanotube, which, being a radio, has a tendency to absorb radio waves and make sound.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
. --Radio
(Shown larger than actual size)
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
At last, they no longer have an excuse for not including an FM radio in the iPod.
Think about it, if we just turned the channel, they'd have no idea why. By publicly complaining about their service, we give them an opportunity to change their business model to one that more people find valuable. That's the way a free market democracy is supposed to work.
It sounds like you want a fascist system where we all have to take what we are given by our corporate masters, and no one has a right to complain about poor service. Tell you what, you go live in a system like that, I'll stay here in America where I still have some shred of rights to free speech.
Love your hypocritical double standard, by the way. We can't complain about corporate radio, but you get to complain about our complaints. Hey, no one is forcing you to read Slashdot, why don't you just leave if you don't like the opinions here?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Great. Radios will also now be a system of tubes. :-)
Seriously, the only problem seems to be that the radio only receives radio signals from the 1930s.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You can now listen to the radio out your dick!
It's true. Cheese contains tyramine, which is a neurotransmitter analogue and an extremely mild hallucinogen -- so mild, in fact, that its effects are only noticeable if you are already asleep and dreaming.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
... there's NO excuse for Steve Jobs not to put a radio in the next iPods!
Reading more closely, we discover that:
.6 cm nanotube structure.
It's not really a complete radio...It's just a tiny tuning fork.
Demos like these make me ask: what the hell happened to research in America?
They left out the fact that they were using a specially tuned PWM transmitter... and a high powered one at that... to vibrate the
They left out (as well) the fact that they were using another specially tuned receiver to detect the movement and turn it back into audio.
They could have done the same thing with almost any material, including a grain of salt, a slice of stale pizza or a drop of water. This is essentially the same as attaching an earphone to a crystal, and then tuning the transmitter to the crystal and making it vibrate by hitting it with a high powered modulated wave. I guess it's cool that they got a huge nsf grant to recreate an incomplete crystal radio.
Using an external process to convert the vibration back into audio is cool and all, but I wish I could win big grants for such elementary application of well-known processes. Hey, maybe I could bounce a laser-beam off the carbon nano-tube and call it a "secure" nano-communications device! Who wants to help me write the NSF research request?
A rerun of the hype surrounding MIT's shocking rediscovery of tesla's magic coil trick.
I predict an NSF funded rebirth of spark gap transmitters.
My curiosity piqued, I looked up more info on Wikipedia (I know not the best but good enough for the purpose) and saw no mention of hallucinogenic properties but a definate connection to headaches.
Do you have another reference?
It would go a long way to explaining last night's truly random dreams. (Cheese and crackers just before bedtime, I was peckish)
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
This single wire in my braces picks up Bob Rivers in the mornings! Must be tuned to 102.5 FM or something.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
A great job of PR! Hopefully, there is really something to it. At the moment, it seems that they have set up a million dollars of high vacuum cryo equipment (I'm guessing) and transmitted audio from one side of the room to the other. You can "rent" web access to their paper for two days for $25 from the ACS. So much for taxpayer-funded open source literature...
Fiat Lux.
As you may well know a single diode and an RC makes a perfectly good AM radio and that's what it looks like this nanotube is acting like.
So I'm going to go with... meh.
Single chip receivers are already cheap and easy all the way through 6GHz. I'm not really sure that this really advances the state of the art. It certainly doesn't help for Wifi systems. It's the support circuitry like RSSI and AGC which eat up a lot of the real-estate. The amp and mixer are typically less than a dozen transistors, or maybe two -dozen.
Also, without gain, which this thing almost certainly does not have, it's basically acting like a resonator, it's going to be a really lousy receiver. Of course it might have gain if it operates in a way which gives it negative resistance, which is possible.
Looks like the usual attention getting press release. Gotta let people know what you are doing with all of that research money.
double meh...
Absolute statements are never true
Just curious.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I skimmed TFA, and maybe I missed it- how are they getting the audio? Are they sure that the wire to get the audio out isn't acting as the antenna or somesuch? It seems awfully odd to me that this litte tiny thing can not only pick up a 1+ meter long wave -and- hook up to something. It seems hard to believe that the interface isn't the thing doing some of the work.
... you poke around in your bellly button. What do you find? Radios. Scratch behind your ear... Radios. Empty the hoover bag... tons of Radios. Ack - what's that in my eye? Oh, damn Radios again. Dang, have to clean my windows again: Radios all over it.
... Stephenson calls them "Toner", and we're not quite as far (yet; they can't move or navigate by themselves), but I'm not holding my breath.
C.f. (e.g.) Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"
But I fear I might have to, in the not-quite-so-far future.
sig? Oh, that sig...
A radio built at a scale appropriate to the amount of worthwhile content on the airwaves.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Looking at the dates detailed in the paper from Peter Burke's group, you can see that it was submitted in June and finished in September, while the paper from Alex Zettl's group was submitted in August and finished in October. Yet... neither of the articles has actually been published yet (they're both available online as pre-prints), and the press release only mentions the second paper.
Zettl's radio looks better in the lab (requires moving parts and a vacuum chamber), but Burke's getting a raw deal here.
I went to highschool with the lead author of this paper. We played TI-82 chess during junior Physics class. Yeah, you guessed it...he kicked my ass.
Officials are quoted as saying the miniaturized RF technology would allow manufactures to finally progress from making cell phones to making mitochondria phones.
Letter To Iran
http://www.dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_014.htm
There are always more ways to make it worse...
If a single nanotube can act as a complete radio, and buckyballs exist in cells, could an
organism evolve radios?
Could it be possible for a new animal or plant to be able to listen in on the data sent via radio?
or maybe a better question:
how hard of a fall could it take before snapping?
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
It's pretty common knowledge where I come from. It did seem a little strange when someone told me why they were refusing cheese so late, it looks so harmless but it causes nightmares!
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Your tuning fork analogy is valid, but you need to remember that it is a nanometer sized tuning fork that vibrates in response to EM waves, not sound waves, and serves as a field emitter. Good luck doing that with any other material. In addition, they were not using a "specially" tuned receiver to pick up the movement - the movement is detected through the resulting modulation of the Field Emission Current, which is especially sensitive to the location of the end of the nanotube. The only tuning involved is through a DC field that changes the tension on the nanotube, which in turn changes its resonant frequency. This is a good thing, because it means you can change the channel on the resulting radio. It's novel and exciting research because the "tuning fork" is on the nanometer scale. Mounting the nanotube in the TEM and observing its vibration is hardly trivial.
In rod we trust!
It seems like every few weeks I hear about how carbon nanotubes are doing something new and exciting.
I for one eagerly await the headline "Carbon Nanotubes cure cancer, bring about world peace, and solve erectile dysfunction."
So, has the RIAA filed a copyright infringement lawsuit yet?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
was followed by "Every Breath You Take" by The Police.... "Every step you take ... I'll be watching you..."
... a bass speaker capable of rattling the windows on the car next to me?
Have gnu, will travel.
I want a model with 9 or 12 or 15 nanotubes, with the number of nanotubes prominently inscribed on the front of the unit. Something you could hold in your hand, with an earphone, something you could take to the ballgame.
...to the bacteria has been returned with a note attached: "Dear humans: If you insult our intelligence again, we'll stop helping you digest for a month or two. If this is indicative of your average intelligence, the world will be a better place with the cockroaches."
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming -- Beavis and Butt-head in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are (heh-heh) like, dead, man!"
How to sell a product (for example - car) ? Add a brand-new nanotube on top and advertise it as "smallest one-nanotube car!!!*" * the nanotube acts only as a nanotube, it requires an actual car to run
You just lost this game
Now we know the answer to Fermi's Paradox, or why we're not being bombarded with radio waves from civilizations more advanced then us:
The researchers believe it would be easy to produce such nanotube radios for receiving signals in the 40-400 megahertz range, a range within which most FM radio broadcasts fall....
Adds Bruce Kramer, "The application of a fully functioning radio receiver less than 50 millionths of an inch in length and one millionth of an inch in diameter potentially allows the radio control of almost anything, from a single receiver in a living cell to a vast array embedded in an airplane wing."It appears that high-powered radio waves are banned in advanced civilizations because they are used for ultra-short-range communications. The question to ask is how long will it be until an advanced civilization comes to us and tells us to "shut the fsck up" because our radio waves are too d@mn loud.
No, I will not work for your startup