Posted on 04/16/2014 1:54:31 AM PDT by blueplum
Materials such as graphene and shrilk are so new that the scientists who discovered them hardly know what to do with them they only know they might yet transform our lives :snip:
Last week, Zhaohui Zhong at the University of Michigan described how graphene might be used to make night-vision contact lenses.
"Graphene has huge potential," says Andrea Ferrari, director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre. "You don't usually find a material that has applications in so many different areas." :snip:
What to call a material made from leftover shrimp shells and proteins derived from silk? Javier Fernandez and Don Ingber at the Wyss Institute at Harvard plumped for shrilk, and the name has stuck. :snip:
Stanene was created virtually, that is by Shoucheng Zhang at Stanford University. Scientists call it a topological insulator, but the name isn't wildly helpful. Stanene is an insulator on the inside, and a conductor on the outside. Thin layers of stanene or one-atom-thick sheets of tin are essentially all surface, and should conduct electricity with 100% efficiency.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I remember back in the early 1990s when Fullerenes (’Buckyballs’); Sorta similar to graphene, were going to revolutionize the world and advance technology by orders of magnitude.
If science could find a way to implement “common sense” it alone would have a far greater affect on the world.
Buckyballs turned out to be a whole ‘nuther can of worms:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/federal-regulators-suing-buckyballs-founder-in-rare-product-recall-case/2014/01/05/5b8c19ec-5087-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html
I seem to recall much ado about a 'wonder material' some time ago. Now, what was that material called again? Abbestos, or something like that?
the infowarrior
Yeah; that’s just it. Forging ahead without due consideration; it’s the liberal way - as is screaming bloody murder until restrictive laws are passed in order to do away with those “innovations”.
Thanks for the post.
Wrong Buckyballs. The article you referred to were about toys/hobby materials with extremely strong magnets in them. The real buckyballs, full name buckminsterfullerene, is 60 carbon atoms in a geodesic sphere, called that because of Fuller’s fascination with geodesic domes for houses.
He’s talking about these:
http://buckyball.smalley.rice.edu/
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/05/buckyball_rice_plaques.php
http://www.nanotech-now.com/nanotube-buckyball-sites.htm
oh. LOL. and thanks for the reading list. I love learning things.
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