nanotube
Inhabitat’s Week in Green: skyscrapers, combustible ice, and coffee-powered cars
The Week in Green is a new item from our friends at Inhabitat , recapping the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us. This week Inhabitat took a peek into the future of our built environment by showcasing the most incredible designs from the 2010 eVolo Skyscraper Competition
Quantum batteries are theoretically awesome, practically non-existent
Today’s dose of overly ambitious tech research comes from the physics lab over at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , in a proposal titled “Digital quantum batteries: Energy and information storage in nano vacuum tube arrays.” It’s like a who’s who of undelivered promises got together and united to form one giant and impossible dream , but it’s one we’d prefer to believe in regardless. Aiming to improve battery performance by “orders of magnitude,” the project’s fundamental premise is that when capacitors — and we’re talking billions of them — are taken to a small enough scale and packed to within 10nm of one another, quantum effects act to prevent energy loss
Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries
It was only a couple of months ago that MIT was wooing us with the energy-preserving properties of carbon nanotubes, and in a classic act of oneupmanship Stanford has now come out and demonstrated paper batteries, which work thanks to a carbon nanotube and silver nanowire “ink.” We’ve seen this idea before, but the ability to just douse a sheet of paper in the proper magical goo and make a battery out of it is as new as it is mindblowing.
Peptide nanotube ‘forest’ coating could mean self-cleaning windows, more efficient batteries, Alzheimer’s cure, world peace
We are rapidly coming to grips with the idea that there is nothing nanotubes can’t do. They’re boosting solar cell efficiency , hoisting more junk into space , and even providing an exceptionally light meal . Now they’ll even clean your windows — well, not your windows, but your future self’s windows thanks to research at Tel Aviv University, where a team has created a way to grow a so-called forest of nanotubes out of peptides
