From the category archives:

Carbon nanotubes

Ten emerging technology trends to watch over the next decade

December 25, 2009

Ten years ago at the close of the 20th century, people the world over were obsessing about the millennium bug – an unanticipated glitch arising from an earlier technology.  I wonder how clear it was then that, despite this storm in what turned out to be a rather small teacup, the following decade would see [...]

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Nanotechnology on Twit TV’s Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour

July 2, 2009

Just a quick post (at least, as far as the text goes). Last week, I had the pleasure of appearing on Twit TV’s Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour with Kristen Sanford and Leo Laporte. The conversation covered nanotechnology from every conceivable angle. I should have known with Leo’s opening question – asking what [...]

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Nanotechnology: From nano-novice to nano-genius in 13 steps

May 26, 2009

Back in April, the folks at the PBS station THIRTEEN asked me to answer 13 questions on nanotechnology and the environment for their website feature Green Thirteen.   The questions ended up covering most of nanotechnology – what it is, what it’s good for, what the downsides might be, and how we might overcome potential problems [...]

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Building better batteries, the Chinese way

April 2, 2009

Reading yesterday’s New York Times, it seems China could well be poised to leapfrog the West in advanced battery technology (China Vies to Be World’s Leader in Electric Cars). According to the article, Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles [...]

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New carbon nanotube study raises the health impact stakes

March 26, 2009

I’m looking at an electron microscope image of a carbon nanotube – as I cannot show it here, you’ll have to imagine it.  It shows a long, straight, multi-walled carbon nanotube, around 100 nanometers wide and 10 micrometers long.  There is nothing particularly unusual about this.  What is unusual is that the image also shows [...]

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Working safely with carbon nanotubes

March 17, 2009

So you want to make or use carbon nanotubes, but you are worried about handling then safely.  What do you do?  The good news is that the UK Health and Safety Executive has just published an information sheet that addresses just this question.  Risk management of carbon nanotubes is (according to the blurb) “specifically about [...]

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Asbestos-like nanomaterials – should we be concerned?

January 23, 2009

I’m afraid the “A” word just won’t go away.  It seems that every time people start thinking about the possible health effects of long, thin, fibrous nanomaterials, the question pops up “is this the next asbestos?”  You’d have thought that the issue would have been resolved by now—after all, nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes have been [...]

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Carbon nanotubes rock—literally!

November 26, 2008

A nanotechnology fix for high-end audio addicts?
I’m sitting at my computer watching a surreal balletic movie—a sheet of highly aligned carbon nanotubes is being slowly stretched, then allowed to slowly contract.  In the background is a soundtrack of traditional-sounding Chinese music.
At least I think the soundtrack is over-dubbed, until I realize that the music is [...]

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Resolving the carbon nanotube identity crisis

October 31, 2008

Twelve months ago today I held a bag of multi-walled carbon nanotubes up before a hearing of the U.S. House Science Committee.  I wanted to emphasize the discrepancy between the current state of the science on carbon nanotubes, and a tendency to classify this substance as the relatively benign material graphite from a safety perspective.  [...]

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Carbon nanotubes: the new asbestos? Not if we act fast.

May 21, 2008

Mix carbon nanotubes and asbestos together (metaphorically) and you get an explosive mix—at least if news coverage of the latest publication coming out of Professor Ken Donaldson’s team is anything to go by.  The research—published on-line today in Nature Nanotechnology—is the first to explicitly test the hypothesis that long carbon nanotubes behave like long asbestos [...]

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