The units, demo versions of which already exist (this is assuredly not a concept), take CO2 in from the air and turn it into liquid, which is easier to store and manage. Professor Klaus Lackner, lead developer, notes that the synthetic trees are not designed to replace, say, coal plants that reduce emissions from the inside, but this could be one very useful plastic plant if it sees mass production. [CNN]

They’re also quicker. A human’s muscle fibers can contract 10% per second, but these can contract 40,000 percent.

I had no idea synthetic muscles materials have come so far. A few years ago, when I was covering JPL’s robotic arm wrestling challenge for Wired, the materials had a fraction of the potential of organic muscles. [Wired]

Motivated by a $US4 million funding prize from NASA, the team at Cambridge University developed a light, flexible ribbon that is believed to be the world’s strongest. Currently, the team is producing 1 gram of the material per day, enough to stretch to 18 miles in length. According to Alan Windle, professor of materials science at Cambridge, NASA wants 144,000 miles of the stuff—but he notes that it would take an industrial level of production to make that happen.

Still, this once preposterous idea is actually gaining some traction. The Japanese have already seriously considered making one out of carbon nanotubes and some believe that this new project could get the job done in as little as a decade. I’m not buying that—but I’m still keeping an open mind. [Times Online via io9]

And these are no ordinary textiles either: they’re transparent and way stronger than a sheet of steel. The team’s technique involves chemically-growing “forests” of nanotubes that self-assemble, and is reported in Science currently. If it proves true we may see nanotube materials replacing metals like steel pretty soon—though I’m not sure how many people would balk at flying in a plane with wings you can partly see through. [Physorg]

The potential benefits of accessing space by crawling up a cable versus launching rockets are mind boggling…especially when you realise it could be 100 times cheaper to get there than using a Space Shuttle. But building a more than 36,000km-long carbon rope (or more likely a series of parallel ropes) to connect an Earth-based “launch pad” with a geostationary-orbiting elevator hub still seems a lot like science fiction. Yet it turns out that development of carbon nanotube technology has seen a more than 100 times increase in the fibre strength in the last five years: four times more strength certainly seems possible.

The Space Elevator Association’s director also thinks technology similar to the Bullet train’s could be used to build the elevator cars, since nanotubes can be used as electrical conductors. Lets hope his vision that “just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space” comes true: my savings fund for going aloft in Virgin Galactic is going to take waaaay too long to fill up. [Timesonline]
Picture: HighLift Systems.

The oil-dampening vibration killing mount can be loaded with an HD camera, night vision camera, still camera, low light camera or thermal imaging camera. The machine also has GPS, which feeds positioning data into the remote control’s LCD. The X6 even can maintain flight if one of its 6 motors stops working. The battery can be charged in 30 minutes, yet can supply the device with 450 watts of power, which allows the machine to climb 7 metres per second, turn 90 degrees in the same time or do fly-bys at 48kph. I don’t know how much these cost, but I’m getting enough enjoyment out of watching the videos at Dragonfly’s site. [Draganfly]