Wonder material the carbon nanotube has another new application: A team at the University of Michigan has worked out how to coat cotton threads with a polymer and nanotube mix to produce conductive mini-cables. Conductive threads per se aren't new, but they generally involve metal which limits their utility—this new material is flexible enough to be woven, won't corrode, and can carry enough current to light up an LED. Crazily the tubes are also suitable for clinical and chemical biosensing, which could point the way for uses in future military wear. [TechnologyReview]

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The UK's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has recently released a report urging for more study of nano-engineered materials, warning that there is a "major gap" in our knowledge of this technology. We've covered the potential dangers of carbon nanotubes here before, but the commission also warns about nano silver, an antibacterial particle that can be found in a variety of clothing, like socks. And in fact, the commission Chair refuses to wear such clothing at all:

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Today's silicon solar panels absorb about two-thirds of the light that reaches them, but a new nanocoating developed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute gives most run-of-the-mill solar panels the ability to capture almost every drop of sunlight. Not only does it grab 96.2% of the sun's rays, but it can do it from any angle, so there's no need for panels to waste energy by mechanically tracking the sun in the sky. This is happy leap forward for solar technology, whose quest for cheapness has been long and hard.

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A technique known as nanolithography was used to build these Obama faces, combining 150 million carbon nanotubes to construct each individual half-millimeter visage. Depending on your political leanings, the result is either the cutest wittle powitician ever or proof that science, in the wrong hands, will engineer miniature robotic Democrats who distract with a message of hope while eating our flesh. As for the undecideds...I'll be honest here. I'm so sick of hearing what those dudes "think." [Flickr via Wired]

Scientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing have just perfected a process by which nanotubes can be coaxed to emit sound, allowing for the construction of ultra-thin, transparent, flexible 'speakers', demonstrated above affixed to a waving flag. Unlike normal speakers, which produce sound with direct vibration, these sheets produce sound with wildly fluctuating temperatures that create pressure oscillations in the surrounding air. In other words, these nanotube speakers — in contrast to other forays into flat sound production — don't vibrate at all.

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Flying in a plane made of a material called 'buckypaper' may not seem too appealing at first, but this new type of carbon nanotube may be the future of lightweight, high strength composite. Discovered accidentally while trying to create the same conditions that exist in a star, buckypaper is far from reaching its potential, but what a potential it is.

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Since we learned yesterday that everyone's mobile phone will be a nuclear weapon detector in the future, it comes as no surprise today that scientists at the University of California have created what is, in effect, a Tricorder. They're calling it a much more modest name (Universal Detector), but the facts of the matter are clear: You'll be able to point this thing at other things and figure out what they're made of.

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Japanese scientists are so hyped up on the possibilities of building a real life space elevator that in just two months' time the country is playing host to a conference designed to set a production timetable. Carbon nanotube technology has advanced so rapidly that a material capable of withstanding the amazing forces in the space elevator cable is almost within reach: according to the chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association it'd only need to be four times stronger than the current strongest nanotube rope.

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The Air Force's Office of Scientific Research has funded a study that's found a novel waterproofing technique that could prevent ice formation and corrosion from damaging parts of an aircraft, like optical sensors. The transparent coating has a nanoporous surface that is superhydrophobic, which makes water droplets form and roll or bounce-off the aircraft's skin rather than collecting, which is how ice formations happen. Better still it can be crafted to send the droplets in particular pathways across the coating, meaning it may also work as a cheap and simple water-collection system for desert environments: this was inspired by the way the Namib Desert beetle gathers moisture. We wonder though... is it as good as Golden Shellback? [AirForceLink]

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Scientists at Northwestern University have demonstrated a new nano-printing technology by printing the Beijing Olympics emblem 15,000 times, each logo so small the whole print run fits inside one square centimeter. 2,500 of the images, made 20,000 90-nanometer dots, would fit on a grain of rice. The polymer pen lithography uses an array of millions of tiny flexible polymer "pens" that can be used to make marks on various different nano-scales, and in this case deposit "ink" made of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid onto a gold substrate (what else would do, in Olympic season?) The team thinks that the technique, which can print out tiny dot-matrix imagery, will find uses in computational tools, medical diagnostics and the pharmaceutical industry. The study is published today in Science Express. [Physorg]

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