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Nanotube Muscles Are Strong As Steel, Light As Air
Al writes "Scientists from the University of Texas at Dallas have created nanotube-based artificial muscles that are light as air and work even under extreme temperatures. The 'muscles' expand width-wise by about 200 percent when a voltage is applied, but are stronger than steel lengthwise. The nanotubes within the fiber naturally stick together. Applying a voltage makes them obtain a charge and repel one another. The researchers created them by stretching bundles of entangled carbon nanotubes into long threads. Several cool videos show the strange stuff in action. Some experts, including one from NASA, believe that the nanotube muscles' ability to withstand extreme heat and cold could make them suitable shape-shifting materials for future space missions."
The fact that it is "strong as steel" and "light as air" seems to me like it could be made into a (very) big net that, when launched into orbit could capture space junk. Hopefully the fact that it stretches 200% could mean that it would have enough elasticity to absorb some of the kinetic energy of the space junk.
As long as the space junk didn't make holes in it, it would slow the junk enough so that they would fall out of orbit quickly. (Maybe the impact of a lot of junk would require periodic re-boosting of the net, I don't know.)
Another idea would be to use AEROGELS. This super lightweight material has already been proven to slow down hyper velocity objects (admittedly just particles) in the spacecraft "Stardust". The main problem with aerogels would be launching it into orbit, although it is very light the necessary volume required would be huge. However, if it could be manufactured in space then just a small amount of raw material could make a gigantic volume of the stuff.
I think you're right that this will never produce the forces required for most 'muscle' purposes.
However if it holds its charge it could be very exciting in terms of capacitance!
I've been playing with synthetic muscles, and I believe magnatism id the only likely way forward. But that Nanotubes are the solution. Esspecially if submerged in ferro fluids, or paramagnetic liquids (e.g. liquid oxygen, though that would not be great re safety). I've already had a bash at simply using thin wire: see vid of lego coil maker and seen here for brief comments.
Because you can - or because you should?
First, we can do both. Second, we NEED ROBOTICS. The west can NOT compete economically against other nations UNLESS we give up our standard of living. The simple fact is, that America made great gains against old Europe by creating automated machinery as well as having lower costs energy coupled with EUs many nations desire to invade each other and lose their status via wars. That is what made us what we were 10 years ago (W and the neo-cons, and I am starting to think Obama and the dems, have been giving it away to china). The ONLY way to move forward is to have robotics, automated machines, and LOW COSTS ENERGY, coupled with expansion (meaning off this rock). By doing robots like this, we can send them to the moon before we get there and have them building permanent structures for us. As to biological research, that goes on.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There's some physics here too to worry about.
Stronger has two meanings. One is the breaking strength of something. e.g. when does the rope break? that's meaning #1.
Now if you are lifting an object, doing work, the more you can lift, and the faster you can left it relate to a second kind of strength.
YOu could have a carbon muscle that had a tensile breaking strength stronger than steel,that was weaker than biological muscle when it came to doing work.
Imagine all these carbon fibers in friction with each other as they jostle and slide to repel. That creates heat. every calorie of that heat is one calorie of pulling work that the muscle cannot do given an initial fixed energy input.
will it scale? don't know but it sounds great for the nanoscale where that sort of consideration is irrelevant?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The 'muscles' expand width-wise by about 200 percent when a voltage is applied, but are stronger than steel lengthwise.
We don't make sense, but we sure like pizza!
I know this is Slashdot, and everyone's busy scripting a botnet or something - but why do so many submissions fail to demonstrate even basic English competency? This is a mistake the average fourth grader wouldn't make. Plus - shouldn't the "editors", oh I don't know, edit these submissions?
#DeleteChrome
I apologize for going way off topic here, but I want to address your root cause assumptions. You apparently think that our current economic state is a result of a couple administration's worth of bad policy makers, but in fact this is something the country as a whole has been working towards since WWII.
After the second great war, this country was pretty much the only industrialized nation to survive unscathed, this much is true - and it led to artificially increasing wages, because we pretty much had a world-wide monopoly on production. This in turn led to a couple of very prosperous decades for the U.S. - the 50's and 60's. During the 70's, however, things began to turn around:
Since the 1970's, our economy has been undergoing a massive shift in the way we do business at home; rather than saving to buy, Americans now buy on credit. Our nation, by maintaining an enormous, advanced military since WWII, coupled with a decline in real wages (and therefore taxable income), has been deficit spending the entire time (actually, the U.S. has been in the red since 1830).
What you see as recent events are simply the ongoing crisis coming to a head. To borrow an apt metaphor, the U.S. sits on a house of credit cards, and there's no way go but down from this perch.
Robotics and space travel are very neat, I agree - but they aren't going to help us. There are only two ways out of this - quickly reverting back to a production economy , or declining into a pre-industrial nation and trying to make our way back from there (Obama, at least, seems to understand this; whether he can do anything about it remains to be seen).
I applaud the idea of low-cost energy, and in fact there seems to be a lot of people around the world that think free energy is currently possible, but as long as there's a profit to be made from inefficient, high cost energy, there will be no change. Thankfully, with worldwide oil production now peaking (if not already in decline), oil is going to become very expensive very soon, and will become very scarce thereafter - many of us may actually live to see the end of oil. This will drive the business world into alternative energies, but even then there'll be food shortages (it takes 10 calories of oil to get 1 calorie of food to your grocer).
And I completely disagree with expansion as a solution to anything. What we need is population reduction, and I'm so very happy that this is now happening in the U.S. (population growth is now at 95% the rate of replenishment). Once we can get the population down to the point where there's not enough people to go around, then we can begin building robotic factories.
Real muscles contract by myofilaments sliding past each other, shortening the overall length of the muscle. In this case no sliding past occurs, and the overall length of the nanotube "muscle" doesn't diminish, so I can't see how this technology could be used to replace actual muscles.
It can be used to replace muscles due to something called Poisson's ratio, which is very high for the nanotube muscle. This effectively does allow it too shorten the overall length.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.