Stronger Than Steel, Harder Than Diamonds
Stronger Than Steel, Harder Than DiamondsWorking with a material 10 times lighter than steel - but 250 times stronger - would be a dream come true for any engineer. If this material also had amazing properties that made it highly conductive of heat and electricity, it would start to sound like something out of a science fiction novel. Yet one Florida State University research group, the Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies (FAC2T), is working to develop real-world applications for just such a material. Buckypaper is made from carbon nanotubes -- amazingly strong fibers about 1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair that were first developed in the early 1990s. Buckypaper owes its name to Buckminsterfullerene, or Carbon 60 -- a type of carbon molecule whose powerful atomic bonds make it twice as hard as a diamond.
Maybe Chinese car makers could need some:
Chinese 4x4 gets zero in safety test
The first Chinese car to be sold in Europe has scored zero — the worst-ever score — in safety tests. It is already on sale in Holland, Germany and Belgium and has been billed as the vanguard of a new invasion of Chinese vehicles. The two-ton 4x4 scored zero stars in crash tests last week by the ADAC, the German automobile club, which carries out tests for Euro NCAP. “It had a catastrophic result,” said a spokesman for the ADAC. “In our 20-year history no car has performed as badly.”
posted by Unknown @ 2:14 AM
2 Comments:
"If it works, perhaps we can make them available to newly coined Palestinians to use for transporting highly volative bomb making materials allowing them to blow themselves up without hurting innocent bystanders."
Now THAT is funny (and not a bad idea)......thanks for the laugh.
Chinese 4x4 gets zero in safety test
I live in the US and subscribe to the US Product Safety Commission newsletters. They tell you which products are under recall for safety issues. During the last year, I would estimate the number of recalls from products made in China to be well into the 90%+ range. I kid you not. Lead paint, toxic materials, shoddy workmanship, everything the US has passed consumer laws to protect our citizens from DECADES ago--are now imported from China with little or no consumer safety regulations that I can find. Does anyone know anything about this? Is this happening in European countries?
*the distributor is NOT the same as the manufacturer. Many of these items are distributed in the US, but made in China or other countries.
Tefta--I'm from Minnesota and haven't really noticed the lack of humor you referred to. Although, my grandmother was from Sweden (came to the US as a 12 year old) and she didn't seem to have much of a sense of humor, but she was quite old, my mom being her "baby."
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"I would estimate the number of recalls from products made in China to be well into the 90%+ range"
Clarification on my muddled statistics above. What I meant to say was that in every newsletter I received, at least 9 out of 10 recalled products were made in China. This has been consistent in the two years I've received the (email) newsletter.
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