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China Has Strongest Fibre That Can Haul 160 Elephants – and a Space Elevator?

posted by Fnord666 on Friday October 26 2018, @04:40PM   
from the space-elevator-or-vapor-wire dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

A research team from Tsinghua University in Beijing has developed a fibre they say is so strong it could even be used to build an elevator to space.

They say just 1 cubic centimetre of the fibre – made from carbon nanotube – would not break under the weight of 160 elephants, or more than 800 tonnes. And that tiny piece of cable would weigh just 1.6 grams.

"This is a breakthrough," said Wang Changqing, a scientist at a key space elevator research centre at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian who was not involved in the Tsinghua study.

The Chinese team has developed a new "ultralong" fibre from carbon nanotube that they say is stronger than anything seen before, patenting the technology and publishing part of their research in the journal Nature Nanotechnology earlier this year.

"It is evident that the tensile strength of carbon nanotube bundles is at least 9 to 45 times that of other materials," the team said in the paper.

But hey, it's China, please consume with a medium-sized boulder of salt.

Source: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2170193/china-has-strongest-fibre-can-haul-160-elephants-and-space

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Original Submission

• Re:Better than taking it with salt Re:Better than taking it with salt (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 26 2018, @08:22PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 26 2018, @08:22PM (#754210)

  When they complain to our courts that it's intellectual property infringement

  Why would they bother complaining? If it's any good, the US would just end up outsourcing it to them anyhow.

  I'd bet a hundred bucks it was stolen from US aerospace tech who wished to keep it proprietary, anyway.

  Then you'd be $100 poorer. Those guys been publishing papers working towards this for years: https://www.natureindex.com/institution-outputs/china/tsinghua-university/513906ba34d6b65e6a000049/Chemistry/Nature%20Nanotechnology [natureindex.com] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0141-z [nature.com]

  Fact of the matter is, the Chinese been doing well in the materiel sciences for at least a good decade now. Look up the Nature's Acknowledgment section and the grants. Their government is clearly pouring public money into this. When was the last time you've seen a US government grant for anything of the sort? There's just no helping it: If you don't invest in progress you're left behind.

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• Re:Better than taking it with salt (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Friday October 26 2018, @10:11PM

  by linkdude64 (5482) on Friday October 26 2018, @10:11PM (#754266)

  I sit corrected.

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