Inexpensive, universal, super nanoglue

A new method allows a self-assembled molecular nanolayer to become a powerful nanoglue by “hooking” together any two surfaces that normally don’t stick well. Unprotected, a nanolayer (green ball: silicon, blue: sulphur, red: carbon, white: hydrogen) would degrade or detach from a surface when heated to 400 degrees Celsius. But when topped with a thin …

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The Global Boom in coal

The world is building a lot of coal-fired power to go with all of the coal-fired power it already has. This is horrible because air pollution from coal kills more than one million people every year. We need to use all other means to reduce the increase in coal usage, this means more nuclear as …

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Better prostate cancer test

A far more accurate blood test for prostate cancer has been created The American Cancer Society projects that in 2007 there will be 219,000 new cases and 27,000 deaths. Yet detecting the disease early has always been problematic. The new tests accuracy: about 3 percent of the time, when the test was positive, there was …

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Follow up on the impact of superconducting motors

Al fin added good information on superconducting motors Note: Al fin has an excellent website with excellent coverage and analysis of future technology. Motors over 1,000 hp utilize approximately 25 percent of all electric power generated in the United States. I had reported yesterday that Korea should have commercial superconducting motors by 2010-2011 Here is …

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Hypersonic progress to better experimental model

Alliant Techsystems (ATK) has demonstrated a simplified hypersonic engine that could enable near-term development of a high-speed strike weapon. Tests included ground runs of a flight-weight, actively fuel-cooled engine at Mach 5. It is an engine design using existing materials, established manufacturing processes and conventional JP10 hydrocarbon fuel. It is tuned to run at a …

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Solar power Progress

Semiconductor for splitting CO2 powered by sunlightKubiak and Sathrum initially used a silicon semiconductor to test the merits of their device because silicon is well-studied. However, silicon absorbs in the infrared range and the researchers say it is “too wimpy” to supply enough energy. The conversion of sunlight by silicon supplied about half of the …

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Researchers Fine Tune Nanotube/Nylon Composite Using Carbon Spacers

More progress on making stronger materials. Stronger materials means existing products can have the same strength but be lighter. Light weight can mean greater fuel efficiency. With enough strength entirely new applications become possible, such as space elevators. Physorg.com brings word of carbon nanotube composites A team of University of Pennsylvania and Rice University researchers …

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1-nanometer resolution is NSF CAREER researcher’s goal for optical imaging

Success on this project would make it far cheaper and easier to see and work at near-molecular nanotech levels. “The resolution of most optical microscopes is restricted by the so-called ‘diffraction limit,’ which means we cannot produce optical images with resolutions higher than a few hundred nanometers,” Xu said. “Currently, the most advanced optical microscope …

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Suberbot cube robots proof of nano building block concepts

Molecular manufacturing has a building block architecture conceptRecent Superbot work shows that modular building blocks can be highly functional. Wei-Min Shen of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute recently reported to NASA significant progress in developing “SuperBot,” identical modular units that plug into each other to create robots that can stand, crawl, wiggle …

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