Thursday, January 25, 2007

Cool Tech Goodies

First on the cool tech parade, we have a super honeycomb structure made out of Y-shaped carbon nanotubes. This structure compensates for a lot of the problems with individual carbon nanotubes by enabling the overall sheet structure to transfer stresses from weaker or broken portions of the sheet to stronger portions.  Seriously cool stuff.  I can’t help but wonder if this might be something for competitors doing the Elevator 2010 space elevator tether competition to look at for next year.

Then today, a NYTimes article on molecular memory chips comes out.  Sure, the molecular bits break after about 10 state changes (0-1 or vice versa), and sure, only about 30% of the sucker even worked at all, but when you’ve still got 160,000 memory cells in the size of a white blood cell, that’s still a HUGE FRICKIN’ DEAL.  Note, that even this proof-of-concept chip is still 40x the densest memory chip currently in existence, and the chief scientist, C Dr. James R. Heath, says that another 10x improvement is possible.  That’s 400x current best-in-show memory.  Any memory maker (Samsung, Intel, Fairchild Semiconductor, Cypress Semiconductor, et al) who isn’t drooling and/or peeing him/herself over this technology just doesn’t get it.