2005-08-18

Not With a Whimper but a Bang

I thought I'd been keeping a pretty close eye on nanotech news, but it seems I was mistaken. I'd never seen a macro-scale object composed of nanotech materials, and assumed that such a thing was still years away . . . I was under the impression we were still screwing around with micro-scale objects.

Silly me.

At the University of Texas in Dallas, a new way of creating carbon nanotubes has very quickly resulted in the ability to make sheets of carbon nanotube material at a rate of seven meters per minute. We were already able to make sheets of some sort, but nowhere near these sizes and rates. In other words, boys and girls, humanity just hit the nano-bigtime (though perhaps we can find a less contradictory way to put it).

These sheets have extraordinary potential. And perhaps most interesting of all, these sheets are transparent.

Read more about it here. Suffice it to say the near-future just got a lot more interesting . . . the potential applications boggle the mind.

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