The World's Longest Carbon Nanotube 142
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you probably know, carbon nanotubes have very interesting mechanical, electrical and optical properties. The problem, currently, is that they're too small (relatively speaking) to be of much use. Now, researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have developed a process to build extremely long aligned carbon nanotube arrays. They've been able to produce 18-mm-long carbon nanotubes which might be spun into nanofibers. Such electrically conductive fibers could one day replace copper wires. The researchers say their nanofibers could be used for applications such as nanomedicine, aerospace and electronics."
Re:One more step toward a space elevator? (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't tomorrow's technology, it is something the human race might do a hundred years from now.
If we have the super strong, super light materials needed to make the space elevator, what else might we do with them? Might we not make better rockets? Or better planes? Might we not make single-stage-to-orbit vehicles which so drastically reduce the price of launch costs that building a space elevator is not only possible, but unnecessary?
Re:Now where s my space elevator? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One more step toward a space elevator? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about the fuel prices. Never has been, and won't be for the foreseeable future. Propellant is cheap, it's the vehicle that's expensive. Elon Musk of SpaceX was recently quoted as saying propellant costs are comparable to the accounting errors.
Remember that the space elevator has to supply all the energy to the payload too, but it has to get it in a much more expensive form -- like electricity beamed from the ground by lasers or some such. Rockets aren't actually all that energy inefficient in comparison.
I used to be a huge fan of the space elevator idea, but then I started looking what those same materials do to rockets. SSTO is just the start. And remember, those materials will change rockets long before they make a space elevator.
Of course, I am a rocket engineer, so I might be a little biased, but I've also examined the problem in some detail :)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
The context it was said in, he did not say "The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP) [Wikipedia]... You can think of it as a series of tubes...".
Here's a clip [youtube.com] with interesting parts from his speech.
I'm also sure you can find the whole thing in the related clips pane. Listen to it (again?) and judge for yourself if he knows what he's talking about
I believe the beating was NOT because he doesn't understand "what the internet is" (that's not a crime, last time I checked), but the fact that he's a legislator working on something that he does not understand at all.
And of course this generation likes bashing on older people because they don't know that the next generation will mock them just the same...
Re:One more step toward a space elevator? (Score:0, Insightful)
The price of the fuel is not what makes rockets inefficient, it's the mass. X amount of the best available rocket fuel can only barely lift the X amount of mass to orbit in a single stage. Even if the vehicle had zero dry weight due to being built of solid unobtainium, the amount of payload to orbit would be miniscule in comparison to the mass of the fuel. Most of the fuel is spent moving the fuel rather than moving the payload. Try looking up the term "mass ratio"...
A space elevator, assuming one could be constructed, would only need the energy that it takes to move the payload alone rather than payload+fuel. This alone would result in hugely massive energy savings. Also, a space elevator can be run at an arbitrary speed so it'd be possible to lift huge payloads (say, one-piece space station) with little power given enough time. Even solar panels would be a viable energy source for unmanned loads.
The only advantage rockets have is speed, which only matters for manned missions. In a world with space elevators, small rockets would probably still be used to transfer people between ground and orbit while commercial satellites, big interplanetary spacecraft etc would go up slow and cheap on the elevator.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
The proof of the analogy is in the reasoning. Senator Stevens, if you recall, was blaming net neutrality for the fact that his email sent by one of his staff on Friday morning didn't arrive in his inbox until the following Sunday morning.
So, yes, I think Senator Stevens deserves a round of jeers on this one. He's obviously bought a load of tosh about how net neutrality hurts users.
In any case, the correct analogy would be: "The Internet is a NETWORK of tubes." This would lead to more correct reasoning. Since the Internet is a network of tubes, if one tube is blocked up, then stuff just flows through a different path. If email don't make it to me in time, it's because there is a screwup at an end point in the network, since blockages in the middle don't delay things much, if at all. This means I should talk to the persons who manage my email server or who manage the specific tube that links that server to the broader network of tubes.