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Building Better Body Armor With Nanofoams
Zothecula writes "Given that scientists are already looking to sea sponges as an inspiration for body armor, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that foam is also being considered ... not just any foam, though. Unlike regular foam, specially-designed nanofoams could someday not only be used in body armor, but also to protect buildings from explosions."
I can see a lot better use for this than putting it on buildings. How often do buildings in the first world get bombed anyway and what affect will it have on demolishing them when needed? Put them in carparks, as crash barriers and traffic devices, even fencing walls, anything to hold cars back so they cannot cause greater damage to others.
Nanotechnology... the next big thing.
I'll get my coat
It sure does make for annoying headlines; but 'nanotechnology' is sort of a concept that is doomed by nature to be spread vacuously thin across all sorts of things, both incremental advances and more remarkable stuff.
There probably a material in existence whose bulk properties don't derive from its structure at a fine scale, so the entire history of fields like metallurgy is 'nanotechnology' in a weak sense. On the other hand, though, most of that history, even to the present for economically viable bulk production, is largely messing around with heating and cooling parameters, and throwing various trace impurities into the mix, and then hoping really hard that the right nanoscale structures self-assemble.
The real problem is deciding where to draw the line between 'yeah, it's "nanotech" in the vacuous sense that all materials engineering is' and 'actually "nanotech" in some sense that makes it worthy of the title'...