Seriously, is there anything carbon nanotubes can't do? We've got shock absorbers, flexible displays, atypically small eating utensils and now, film-like speakers. For times when NXT flat drivers simply aren't thin enough, a team of Chinese researchers have reportedly found a way to create sound from a thin sheet of carbon nanotubes. The film, which could be stretched and placed on PMPs, HDTVs or even clothing, can generate sound when "zapped with a varying electric current." Great, the perfect recipe for a new wave of Milli Vanilli copycats. A video of the tech can be seen after the jump.

[Via Physorg]

If the third time is the charm, yet you botch that attempt just like the earlier two, then what? That's the problem facing NASA and its Space Elevator Challenge, which has for three successive years failed to live up to the vision of Arthur C. Clarke. Japan isn't waiting for a fourth, announcing plans to spend $7.3 billion on its own lift to whisk passengers (and cargo) 22,000 miles aloft on composite cables. It's the cables that are the problem, as they need to be 180 times stronger than steel and obviously much, much lighter. The Japanese are focusing on carbon nanotubes, and while they will need to be engineered four times stronger than current stock before they're up to the task, their highly conductive nature means they can not only support the lift vehicle but also power it. Useful, that, because the ride up could take a couple of days or even weeks, and astronauts will need some way to recharge their PMPs.

The Tigers down at Clemson University are doing more than deciding whether an all-purple uniform really sends a sense of fear to the opponent, as they're also crafting shock-absorbing carbon springs which could theoretically protect gadgets when they crash to the ground. In working with researchers at UC San Diego, the crew has determined that layers of tiny coiled carbon nanotubes can act as "extremely resilient shock absorbers." The team envisions their discovery finding its way into body armor, car bumpers, bushings and even in shoe soles, but we're hoping that cellphones and PMPs get lined with this stuff to protect from those butter-finger moments.

[Via Physorg]

Carbon nanotubes may very well kill you (okay, so that's very much a stretch), but you'll have a hard time convincing the dutiful scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to stop their promising research. Put simply (or as simply as possible), said researchers have discovered that "networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes printed onto bendable plastic perform well as semiconductors in integrated circuits." So well, in fact, that the nanotube networks could one day "replace organic semiconductors in applications such as flexible displays." Granted, there is still much to do before these networks are ready for product integration, but you can bet these folks aren't hitting the brakes after coming this far.

Nanotubes are the stuff invisible dreams are made of, producing batteries, ramen, tiny chips, and in this case, invisible tightropes. Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy has figured out a way to spread invisible nanotubes 5 micrometers apart that he says could support an entire human. The resulting "cable" would measure 1 centimeter in diameter and weigh just 10 milligrams per kilometer. So, what would we do with this ultra-strong, invisible cable? Support things that weigh about as much as humans do, naturally. Really, though, this means that super-strong, super-small cables are coming, and architecture could be changed forever. Other uses abound, for sure, but we'll leave that speculation to the science guys.

[Via NewScientistTech]

Now that just looks extra scrumptious, doesn't it? What you're peering at above is believed to be the world's tiniest ramen bowl, created by a clever bunch of scientists from the University of Tokyo. Reportedly, Masayuki Nakao and his students "used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter 1 / 25,000 of an inch in a project aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology." In other words, they carved a bowl out of nanotubes, which can now only be viewed through a microscope. Best of all, they didn't stop with just the dinnerware, as they managed to insert a number of inedible noodles to round things off -- each of which measured "one-12,500th of an inch in length with a thickness of one-1.25 millionth of an inch." Don't get any bright ideas here, McDonald's, ditching SuperSize was bad enough.

The scientific and engineering possibilities of carbon nanotubes are hard to overestimate, but a study out of the UK might put a damper on the small-scale party for a while: mice injected with certain lengths of nanotubes developed lung problems similar to those caused by asbestos. Apparently the long, straight shape of the nanotubes causes problems for the lining of the lungs designed to deal with particulate matter, which can cause scarring, inflammation, and "probably cancer in the long term." That's a big "probably," however -- researchers say they're a long way from actually proving the link between long nanotubes and cancer, but no one's denying that it's troublesome, including the Nanotechnology Industries Association, which told the BBC that "there could be reason for concern... but it needs to be validated." It also seems like the focus is on handling the tech correctly, which is promising -- we'll keep an eye on how this plays out.

[Thanks, TC]

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]

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.

We've seen some interesting nanotech power concepts in the past, but researchers at UCLA have gone back to basics and developed a printable nanotech version of a traditional battery they say could power other printed, flexible nanotech devices. The batteries, which are less than a millimeter thin, feature the same zinc-carbon makeup as traditional rechargeables, but are made by depositing thin layers of zinc and manganese oxide over a layer of nanotubes. Sadly, tech isn't producing usable amounts of power yet, but lead scientist George Gruner says the simplicity of the underlying tech should make it easy to solve that problem. Damn straight -- we're not giving up till we get a pair of electric underpants to call our own.

[Image courtesy of CNano]

For the second time in the past few months, Purdue University is hitting us up with a newfangled idea to keep future rigs cooler. This go 'round, engineers have purportedly figured out how to "grow forests of carbon nanotubes onto the surfaces of computer chips to enhance the flow of heat at a critical point where the chips connect to heat sinks." The nanotubes have outperformed "conventional thermal interface materials" in testing, and being that they don't require "elaborate clean-room environments" to produce, manufacturing them should prove much cheaper to boot. Regrettably, there's no word as to when this development could go commercial, but with users demanding more power and less noise, we're sure there's a market waiting.

[Via Physorg]

The wild and wacky frontier of hard drive technology is always full of surprising new ways to keep those drive capacities growing, and this new patent for leaking nanotube-housed lubricant onto disc platters is no exception. Apparently, a heated hard disc is capable of cramming more data into closer quarters, but the method hasn't been implemented in current drives since the heat evaporates the lubricant that allows the recording head to travel smoothly over the disc, causing a fatal disc crash. Seagate's new patent addresses the issue by storing lubricant in a special material made from millions of carbon nanotubes and embedded in the drive housing. As the disc spins, lubricant is slowly leaked out, and the disc can be kept safe for its whole lifetime. The upshot of all this is that Seagate can use the heat-assisted recording to cram several terabits per square inch into a drive -- 10 times as much data into the disc than is currently possible. We guess there'll be a bit of a wait for this to make it to market, but we greatly look forward to an educational video on the subject all the same.

[Via New Scientist]

Check it grandpa, 'cause your 18th century inventions are set to change modern portable electronics in a big way. Those neomaxizoomdweebies over at MIT have discovered a process whereby capacitors -- those little stored energy devices knocking dim-witted TV tinkerers on their asses for decades -- can be slathered at the electrodes with nanotubes thereby increasing the surface density to store more energy. So just like a thick fuzzy towel soaks up more slop than a bedside sock, these new capacitors can be kept small and store the equivalent energy of today's chemical batteries. Why do you care? Well, the device could potentially be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and in only a matter of seconds saving you time and the environment, heartburn. Prototypes are expected within the next few months with actual product hitting the market in less than five years. Fuel cells, fool cells, bring on the capacitors!

We can't say it was love at first sight for us and carbon nanotube displays, with the first screen cap resembling a Lite-Brite a lot better than a next generation display technology. Well, now we're ready to give this nano tech another chance, since Syscan Imaging has just managed to squeeze a 1920 x 1080 resolution onto a 0.7-inch LCoS microdisplay for use in projection TVs. It's even at a lower cost than competing technologies, and should hopefully overcome some of the current problems with the low yields and color inconsistencies of LCoS. Carbon nanotube displays also run cooler and have zero ghosting, so we're pretty stoked, but we'll have to wait until 2007 for these to make it to shelves.

[Via HD Beat]