Link: U. T. Dallas-led research team produces strong, transparent carbon nanotube sheets.
Some excerpts from what could be a huge breakthrough on actually how to produce NanoTubes.....
"Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible, and rarely does such an advance so quickly enable diverse application demonstrations,"
The nanotube sheets are produced at up to 7 meters per minute by the coordinated rotation of a trillion nanotubes per minute for every centimeter of sheet width. By comparison, the production rate for commercial wool spinning is 20 meters per minute.
The nanotube sheets can be made so thin that a square kilometer of solar sail would weigh only 30 kilograms.
There are several thousand ideas for the use of nanotube technology from artificial organs to supercapacitors, batteries, fuel cells and thermal-energy-harvesting cells exploiting giant-surface-area nanotube sheet electrodes; light sources, displays, and X-ray sources that use the nanotube sheets as high-intensity sources of field-emitted electrons; and heat pipes for electronic equipment that exploit the high thermal conductivity of nanotubes.
But my favorite is this one. An extremely intriguing idea ... a Space Elevator!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Stay tuned for more on NanoTubes and NanoTechnology....
Sidenote: My gut tells me that Nanotechnology is very possibly today's "lightbulb invention" by Edison circa 1870. Think of all the applications and technologies that resulted from that invention to present day which includes transistor technology. Its important to remember that a transistor was simply another "combination technology" combining the technologies of a "transmitter" (sound waves) and a "resistor" (conductive electricity). Transistors replaced Vacuum Tubes and performed the same functions by greatly reducing power and space requirements. With Nanontubes, we are therefore on the verge of going even smaller, lighter, and even greater power reductions and thus being able to produce the incremental technology leap needed for the next century of applications.
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