Cambridge Team Spins Nanotube Yarn

FridayBob writes "They say it's bound to happen soon, although nobody knows exactly how and when. Well, perhaps the answer has arrived. It now seems as though some bright folks at the Cambridge-MIT Institute have figured out a way to continuously spin carbon nanotubes into a fiber. Will it be strong enough for a space elevator?" They're getting closer to commercialization (see older story) but not there yet...

Re:Sudan

[Anonymous Coward]

all that work to be political and all you had to do was say "FP!!" and you would have gotten the same moderation.

Re:Tie satellites

[justanyone]

Yes, but the end of the fiber would trail across the Earth as the Earth turned. The moon takes 30 days to go around the earth, the day takes (ah-Hah!) 1 day to go around, thus the cable would be traveling about 1000 miles an hour, would heat up and fail, which would just wreck the climbing scenario.

Unless!! You could run 1000 mph to jump on, climb VERY FAST to get above the atmosphere before it failed, and carry enough oxy water and food to climb the 286,000 miles up to the moon. Okay, there'd be no gravity after the first 40,000 miles or so, but it's those first 40,000 miles that really GETCHA. Feel tha burn, baby! No Pain, no Gain!

new MIT course this fall...

[Glog]

Nanotube Knitting 101

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:"Electrical current", eh?

[tornater]

Isn't the rectenna that giant satellite dish that came out of Cartman's butt in the first episode of SouthPark? Just asking.

Efficiency too bad...

[Goonie]

I've been considering this for awhile, and I think the best solution is to convert the energy to fuel. Specifically, anti-matter. If we can develop an effective way to extract energy from matter/antimatter annihilation, then we could use Solar Energy to power antimatter fuel plants.

And if we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs - if we had some eggs.

Antimatter might be a very dense way of storing energy, but making it is incredibly inefficient [psu.edu] (PDF). The efficiency of current particle accelerators is about 0.0001% (in terms of energy in/energy stored in antimatter out), and the best that the physicsts seem to think we can do in the near term is about 0.01%. You'd probably get better energy efficiency by putting mirrors in orbit, shining extra light on a plantation in Canada, and running a wood-fired turbine on the extra wood grown.

Antimatter is cool, but it's not going to be widely used as the world's ultimate battery in your or my lifetime.

Re:Conductor

[Anonymous Coward]

"The last thing one would wear over the already conducting human bodies is cloth made of another conductor."

Actually, a conductive high-tensile strength cloth would make an ideal ballistic jacket that also counters tasers (since the current from the taser would travel through the jacket rather than the person). Connect to ground and you have the ultimate anti-static device for techs.

"OK! My opinion would change if this fibre can store some bits and bytes also though."

Err, YOU might like the idea of wearing the same shirt every day, but some of us like to change and wash occasionally.

Re:Chain Mail

[ckaminski]

Which is why they invented ripstop. YOu know, that stuff sailboats use to keep their sails from getting destroyed when a seagull crashes through 'em?