Nobel physics prize for ultrathin carbon discovery - Yahoo! News This could be a new way to store energy, it could finally give us the Synchronous Skyhooks that Arthur C Clarke envisioned (Fountains of Paradise), many other applications are possible
The potential applications of this are exciting. Not just sychronous skyhooks, also known as space elevators, but electronics, aircraft, cars...perhaps of the same magnitude of change as plastics. Mr Clarke's ideas continue to impress, despite his insistence that he be remembered as 'just a writer'.
Not his fault - part of the site's slowdown, I guess. It's easy to hit the post button twice while you're waiting for it to go. So, why did you reply to the wrong one?
This sounds like a Silver Bullet. Is this the sort of algorithm-breaking technology that could lead to a 100 lb., 300 mile EV battery in, lets say, 10 years? :rip: ICE. :rockon:
Who would believe that you could make a carbon sheet a single atom thick with scotch tape? The global warming naysayers would never believe that.
Has to be completely amorphous. Metals are too crystalline. Are there any glassy metals? You can probably make glassy ceramics from aluminum organo-compounds. Your clear oven countertops are glassy ceramics.
One of those same guys won a 2000 Ignoble prize in Physics for using diamagnetism to levitate a live frog. Maybe now he'll be taken more seriously.
I used to work with a man who, when someone used a "But... " statement, would shout, "BUT?? If frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their butts when they hop." Well, it looks like this frog isn't bumping his butt: The Levitating Frog Video- The Simple Explanation: "As you probably saw many times when playing with magnets, magnets push each other away if you try to bring together their like poles, for example, two north or two south poles. Similarly, the north pole of the external field will try to push away the “north poles” of magnetized atoms. "Our magnet creates a very large magnetic field (about 100 to 1000 times larger than school or household magnets). "In this field, all the atoms inside the frog act as very small magnets creating a field of about 2 Gauss (although very small, such a field can still be detected by a compass). One may say that the frog is now built up of these tiny magnets all of which are repelled by the large magnet. The force, which is directed upwards, appears to be strong enough to compensate the force of gravity (directed downwards) that also acts on every single atom of the frog. So, the frog’s atoms do not feel any force at all and the frog floats as if it were in a spacecraft." The full explanation: High Field Magnet Laboratory - The Frog That Learned to Fly
No, I do not know why the thread appeared twice. I was perfectly sober when I submitted it Maybe that was my problem!
Floating frogs aside, the potential for this discovery extend to every field - batteries, chemistry, structures, etc. I do not understand why the thread posted twice. Though perhaps it was because I was stone cold sober when I posted it. Big mistake there
Just think how much sooner this could have been discovered if all that wasted money trying to prove AGW was given to projects such as this.
Yes, we have to figure out priorities. The bucket of money isn't bottemless. Sometimes the application can be two or more decades off, but R&D in advanced theoretical projects is where I would prefer the money be spent. Promise for nuclear fusion test reactors, findings show What I find disappointing is that there is only ONE tokamak research reactor in the entire country.
