Researchers produce strong, transparent carbon nanotube sheets (big advance)

University of Texas at Dallas , physorg.com ^ | 18 Aug 05 | staff

[JustAnotherOkie]

You could sew them into and invisible Bucky Ball Sack.

[solzhenitsyn]

"The latest research was funded by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, an agency of the United States
Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific
Research..."

Is DARPA trying to take credit for another one of Al Gore's inventions?!!

[Noumenon]

Yep

[darth]

Yup. Nanotubes, in theory, are 600X as strong as steel of the same weight. We should be able to run an elevator to geosychronous orbit and beyond. That's the real payoff.

[bayourod]

"We should be able to run an elevator to geosychronous orbit and beyond"

Who cares about that? I just want a giant flat screen TV that I can hang on the wall without having to use those damn expansion bolt thingies.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Transparent aluminum has already been done. There was a thread on it.

[q_an_a]

just think what might be happening in Texas if Newt and a bunch of penny pinching GOP had not shut down the Super Collider 8 years ago. We spent more money on an overpass project called the High 5, conservative but short sighted GOP leaders stopped the idea machine and sent it to the Swiss.

Now we see funding for NanoTechnology by the Defense Dept, like money for the Internet spent 20 years ago. Good ideas are part of building and defending the country. Jobs come from research like this and the research is often funded by government. /broken promises for science research rant off.

[Lauretij2]

I have to agree, the shutting off to the Super Collider was one of the biggest mistakes Republicans ever did.

[q_an_a]

thanks for your post.

[doc30]

If the nanotubes break of and form dust, it would have health issues similar to asbestos dust. No company would dare to make or use them for fear of lawsuits. The trial lawyers would salivate at that prospect.

[TommyDale]

Spider webs are stronger than steel in the same size or weight.

[Graymatter]

Artificial muscles from nanotechnology? Wake me when human wings are over-the-counter. I want to fly. You can have the electric cars and the elevator to the moon, even the teleporter. Just give me wings.

[Drammach]

I think you're ahead of the curve and not (too) paranoid at all..

I read an article ( I have to locate it again ) concerning China's "big push" in Nanotech R&D..
They recognize it's future and want to get in on the ground floor, be a leader in the new technology..

I have no doubt that the Chinese are on this like a dog on a bone..
Unlimited Budget..

[RinaseaofDs]

What about tanks that move as fast as funny cars? Tanks with four times the rate of fire, where the whole thing is a highly sensitive antennae array for intercepting not just radiofrequency comms and radar, but even sound.

Somebody in a trench's stomach starts growling and you have four carbon nanotube armored tanks bearing down on you.

Body armor would probably render bullets obsolete. Best thing you could do with a machine gun is literally beat somebody to death with it. The impact of the round would still knock somebody over like a punch, but the bullet wouldn't go through.

[JamesP81]

Artificial muscles from nanotechnology? Wake me when human wings are over-the-counter. I want to fly. You can have the electric cars and the elevator to the moon, even the teleporter. Just give me wings.

Seriously, there is a number of books written by John Ringo (There Will be Dragons, Emerald Sea, Against the Tide) that deal with this stuff. In the future, mankind has genetically engineered himself and his environment. For kicks, someone engineered a real, live dragon. And his wings were made of carbon nanotubes so they could suppport their own weight.

We're talking about real science fiction here.

[JamesP81]

Body armor would probably render bullets obsolete.

Unlikely, for several reasons. First of all, and the most obvious solution, is to make carbon nano-tube ammunition, that is assuming that the nanotubes have good ballistic impact characteristics, which nothing I read in the article suggested.

Secondly, such armor would suffer from many of the same shortcomings that kevlar does. When a person is hit by a bullet, it's not the 30 caliber hole through them that kills. When you think about how redundant a human body is, it's hard to find a single place you could punch a small hole through someone and gurantee a kill.

This is where hydrostatic shock comes in. The human body is mostly water. When you throw a rock in a pond, you get a ripple effect from the center of where the rock landed in the pond. A similar thing happens when a bullet hits you, except the ripples are violently powerful. These ripples in the water in your body rupture your cells. This is what kills you. It's one of a couple of the reasons why gunshot wounds cause so much internal bleeding and leave large exit wounds. While nanotube armor may stop bullets (or may not, as I mentioned above), the armor still will not protect from the deadliest effect of a firearm: hydrostatic shock. If you're wearing armor and it stops a 30-06 moving at 3000 feet per second, you will still have to have medical attention within a short period, or you'll still die.

[Moral Hazard]

"Who cares about that? I just want a giant flat screen TV that I can hang on the wall without having to use those damn expansion bolt thingies."

And I want a giant flexible screen so I can create something like Circlevision, but in real time in my own house playing video games.

[Moral Hazard]

"just think what might be happening in Texas if Newt and a bunch of penny pinching GOP had not shut down the Super Collider 8 years ago."

Yeah, they might have discovered the Higgs Boson. Just think of the commercial implications!

[Moral Hazard]

"Body armor would probably render bullets obsolete."

I think there's an additional point here. The transparent nanotubes sheets may make it practical to create a bullet resistant face shield that a soldier can still see through.

[RinaseaofDs]

That's the point I was making when I said that the bullet would essentially serve only to beat a person to death. Can't violate the rules of physics.