Month: January 2009

Cracked to MAD Magazine

Look, I know you still love magazines and the Internet probably seems like a big and scary place to you, but wake up. Every website on the Internet has more content than your site. For shit’s sake, I have more fun going to Pepsi’s website and pretending I’m in a shitty dance club than I do going to your site, and you’re supposed to be entertaining.

Economic Nationalism

Such naked protectionism may violate international trade rules. But another perverse idea floating around Capitol Hill is to limit stimulus-related purchases to countries that have signed the World Trade Organisation’s agreement on government procurement. A treaty set up to encourage non-discrimination in government purchases would thus be twisted to bar the American government from buying goods from countries such as China and India.

the morons have learned nothing from last time.

Henrietta Lacks

Every single one of the cell lines Gartler was investigating, and countless others being used around the world, had been contaminated by HeLa cells. They had taken over every Petri dish of cells they had come near.

2014-06-10: A bit more on HeLa contamination

As we have more cell lines to work with and as we’re able to learn more about the molecular specifics that identify those cell lines, people are starting to go back and re-evaluate old research.

Not only is it becoming clear that results have been skewed by the use of less-than-ideal cell lines, in many cases, the scientists weren’t even using the cell lines they thought they were using. Instead, mistakes in the laboratory meant that cell lines got mixed up with one another. A common problem: Tough, fast-growing cells finding their way into a dish of weaker-growing cells, where they quickly take over. The dish is labeled as being one thing, but the cells now growing there are totally different. HeLa, the line of cells derived from the cervical cancer tumor of an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, are infamous for invading test tubes all over the world. “You don’t even need sloppy lab technique. All it takes is for a droplet of HeLa to fall into another culture. Then it’s survival of the fittest and HeLa is very fit.”

Graphene

Researchers have produced a ground-breaking new material, graphane, which has been derived from graphene. What is huge: 1. Graphene has already has a lot of great properties. Strongest material. Very conductive. 2. Now graphene can be chemically modified to tune the properties even more. Making something highly conductive and highly insulating means all kinds of electrical devices are possible 3. This is opening the door to even more chemical modification. 4. Graphene has already been turned into proof of concept liquid crystal display devices (single pixel) and quantum dots and transistors

Materials science rarely gets the respect it deserves. We really should all bow before these people. They make modern civilization.
2013-03-25: Graphene is nearly here.

A 10000 Farad Supercapacitor is powerful enough to power a Semi Truck while being the size of a paperback novel. Tesla promised to get the price of lithium batteries down to $150 / kWh by 2020, our current cost estimated for this type of graphene based supercapacitor is about $100 / kWh today and we should be able to cut this pricing in half by the end of 2015

2013-07-16: Graphene is one of my bets for most impactful technology of the 21th century.

A new form of Carbon : Grossly warped ‘nanographene’ : The new material consists of multiple identical pieces of “grossly warped graphene,” each containing exactly 80 carbon atoms joined together in a network of 26 rings, with 30 hydrogen atoms decorating the rim. Because they measure slightly more than a nanometer across, these individual molecules are referred to generically as “nanocarbons.”

Odd-membered-ring defects such as these not only distort the sheets of atoms away from planarity, they also alter the physical, optical, and electronic properties of the material.


2015-02-27: A kind of moore’s law for graphene. If you can convince enough of the industry that the roadmap is real, it becomes real due to all the investment it triggers

In an open-access paper published today in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale, more than 60 academics and industrialists lay out a science and technology roadmap for graphene, related 2-dimensional crystals, other 2d materials, and hybrid systems based on a combination of different 2d crystals and other nanomaterials.

The roadmap covers the next 10 years and beyond, intended to guide the research community and industry toward the development of products based on graphene and related materials.

2015-05-21:

The new roll-to-roll manufacturing process described by his team addresses the fact that for many proposed applications of graphene and other 2-D materials to be practical, “you’re going to need to make km2 of it, repeatedly and in a cost-effective manner.”

50cm / min is starting to get interesting.
2016-01-07:

Researchers found a way to incorporate carbon nanotubes and graphene into spider silk. “We measure a fracture strength up to 5.4 GPa, a Young’s modulus up to 47.8 GPa and a toughness modulus up to 2.1 GPa. This is the highest toughness modulus for a fiber, surpassing synthetic polymeric high performance fibres (e.g. Kelvar49) and even the current toughest knotted fibers.”

2017-06-10:

The use of graphene as an additive can give mechanical and electrical benefits to composite materials, making them multifunctional. In a novel fermentation method, Graphene Flagship researchers have developed graphene-containing rubber foams with unusual mechanical and electrical behaviors: when stretched, the composite foams expand and become more conductive. These unexpected properties could be promising for use in smart filters and medical devices.

Alliance Rubber intends to help determine exactly how this super-material could be used in its products. The partnership will explore potential uses for graphene-infused rubber bands for many other characteristics.

  • Graphene-rubber bands could act as bar codes for produce in grocery stores
  • Heat-sensitive bands which change color depending on the temperature.

2022-04-15:

Graphene and carbon nanotubes are undoubtedly the materials of the future. In their perfect form they are the strongest materials that are known to exist, with thermal conductivity among the highest of known materials, and even superconducting electrical properties. However, defects in the lattice structure cause significant decreases in these physical properties; and so quality and purity are of paramount importance. On top of this it is very difficult to make continuous sheets more than a couple of millimeters long, and even harder to wrangle this atomically thin layer into real-world applications. We recommend paying attention to companies that are developing methods to produce graphene and CNTs in larger sizes and for lower costs. And we will be tracking companies that show themselves to be successful at leveraging today’s low-quality graphene flakes to improve existing products, or to develop new capabilities for applying this material in novel ways.

2023-01-17: More C allotropes.

An allotrope is a substance with a defined structure that’s made up of only one element, but differs from another form of the same pure element. Graphite (familiar as pencil “lead”) is a famous allotrope of carbon, and it has the same infinite-stacked-sheets-of-atoms structure. Single isolated sheets, known as graphene, were (famously) isolated a few years ago, and these single-atom-thick are different enough that most people consider them a different allotrope than even graphite, which name is used for the bulk material. So what if you took a structure like graphene, the flat sheet of 6-membered rings, and made a flat sheet of buckyballs instead? That has now been prepared and named “graphullerene”.