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Posts with tag carbon nanotube

UCLA researchers create self-healing, power-generating artificial muscle


We've seen self-healing materials and artificial arms, but a team of researchers hailing from UCLA have taken two fabulous ideas and wed them together to create "an artificial muscle that heals itself and generates electricity." Put simply, the contracting / expanding of the material can generate a small electric current, which can be "captured and used to power another expansion or stored in a battery." The scientists have relied on carbon nanotubes as electrodes rather than metal-based films that typically fail after extended usage, and in an ideal world, the research could eventually lead to (more) walking robots and highly advanced prosthetics. Integrate an AC adapter in there and we're sold.

[Via CNET]

Researchers get nanotube chips running at commercial speeds

Carbon nanotubes have a ton of promise, and we've seen a lot of prospective applications for the tech, but researchers at Stanford, working with Toshiba, have managed to demonstrate the first use of nanotubes in chips that run at commercially-viable speeds. The chip features 256 ring oscillators and packs over 11,000 transistors in just one hundredth of a square inch. When wired with the nanotubes and powered up, the chip ran at speeds between 800MHz and 1.06GHz -- not desktop speeds, to be sure, but still promising. The team says that while the experiment bodes well for the future, we shouldn't expect any direct applications yet -- but you know we're dreaming of tiny implantable supercomputers anyway.



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