A few weeks ago I ran across a quote about liberty, in Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley, a noted futurist and science fiction writer. In 1958, he wrote:

"But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government."

As I write this, the current Homeland Security Threat Level is "Yellow - Elevated" with the airline sector at Orange. Any guesses when we will cease to be on a near-war footing?

Chris Phoenix

This adds one more large molecule to the nanoscale construction toolbox. The ribbons may be useful in electronics, since a film of them should be even more conductive than a film of buckytubes. So they will likely be researched.

The article didn't say so, but I also speculate that these ribbons may be useful as reinforcements in composite materials (like a better kind of carbon fiber), since they seem to be water-soluble (which helps with processing) and might be easier to attach other molecules to than nanotubes are. The researchers estimate that they could be available in ton amounts in a couple of years, if there's demand for them.

In any case, I'm sure they'll be experimented on in many ways. They may turn out to be useful in mechanical nanosystems, though they'd probably be pretty floppy in comparison with buckytubes.

The unzipping process was discovered by Dmitry Kosynkin, a post-doctoral research associate at Rice University, who was studying oxidation of nanotubes. Yes, a lot of nanotechnology is accessible through chemistry.

(Hat tip to Mike Treder.)

Chris Phoenix

An electronic quantum processor with two qubits, each made of about a billion aluminum atoms, has been created at Yale university. They can get the qubits to maintain their state for about a microsecond. And they have a "quantum bus" that can pass information between the bits.

I don't understand all the cool things you can do with a quantum computer, but apparently it can be useful for simulating quantum chemistry. I suspect we'll have covalent-solid molecular manufacturing before this quantum computer technology develops to the point where it can help, but I've been surprised before by how fast technologies can advance.

Chris Phoenix