Carbon Magnets At Room Temperature 213
Bolie writes: "Trying to make high temperature super conductors yielded an unexpected result. The pure carbon bucky ball material was put under pressure to make sheets. That worked. Picture microscopic bubble pack. But the result was a sheet that was magnetic at room temperature. It has not escaped the attention of the discoverer, Tatiana Makarova, that this might be useful for a non-metallic computer memory. The material is also lighter than metals, flexible and transparent. Lasers anyone?"
minus signs (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't make sense of that. 255C is higher than 200C. Did they mean -255C and -200C ?
250 degrees ? 200 ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Is it just me, or do the following quotes from the article not make sense ?
The new magnetic sheet "...is the first non-metallic magnet to work at room temperature."
"...she found instead that the new material was magnetic even above 200 C. Until now, the highest temperature at which a non-metallic material was magnetic was 255 C."
Which is it ?
Re:minus signs (Score:2, Insightful)
Storage? (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, so yet another possible way to store lots of data. We hear about these all the time (holographic memory, molecular storage etc.), but when are we actually going to get some of this - at the moment everyone still seems to be working on Winchester drives and semiconductor memory.
Is all this just pie in the sky, or are people actually producing devices that use these exotic storage methods? I figure this is about the best place to ask.
Re:Why the exotic ideas? (Score:2, Insightful)
We see the world through the filter of our own experience. When something like this is posted on Slashdot, where a lot of people eat/sleep/breathe computers, the first idea is naturally going to be, "How can this make my computer better?".
By your super-motor idea, I imagine that you deal with motors quite a bit (perhaps as an engineer?). It's just a matter of perspective.
Re:Good news for NanoTech. (Score:2, Insightful)
You forgot the biggie - Carbon is good for life!
wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yay Buckyball Experiments (Score:2, Insightful)