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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   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday October 27 2018, @12:33AM (7 children)

    by c0lo (156) on Saturday October 27 2018, @12:33AM (#754309) Journal

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

    Japan did the same during '60-'70 - took western technology, reversed engineered it, then optimised the crap out of it and brought the quality and reliability of the product well above the ones they started with.
    Leting aside color TVes and cars and industrial robots, take Seiko watches [wikipedia.org]:

    The first prototypes of an electronic quartz wristwatch (not just portable quartz watches as the Seiko timekeeping devices at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964) were made by the CEH research laboratory in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. From 1965 through 1967 pioneering development work was done on a miniaturized 8192 Hz quartz oscillator, a thermo-compensation module, and an in-house-made, dedicated integrated circuit (unlike the hybrid circuits used in the later Seiko Astron wristwatch). As a result, the BETA 1 prototype set new timekeeping performance records at the International Chronometric Competition held at the Observatory of Neuchâtel in 1967

    See also the Quartz crisis [wikipedia.org]

    ---

    On another line: wake up, guys.

    There used to be a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson presenting the state of scientific research in America [openculture.com]. It showed that the published science discoveries in America per capita started to decline around 2000 It also showed that the rate of growth in new discoveries was much higher in other countries.

    China spent $279 billion on R&D in 2017 [cnbc.com] and is poised to overtake US soon [eos.org] (some reports indicating end of 2018 [thehindubusinessline.com]).

    .

    Meanwhile Neil deGrasse Tyson can still do nothing but to decry the "progress" brought in by antivaxers and climate change "skeptics" and "teach the controversy" [youtube.com]

    When you have an established scientific emerging truth, it is true whether or not you choose to believe; and the sooner you understand that the faster we can get on with the political conversation about how we can solve the problem we are facing

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 27 2018, @01:33AM (6 children)

    by legont (4179) on Saturday October 27 2018, @01:33AM (#754326)

    How about this solution. The US has more livable territory than China and more resources. Open free immigration and accept say a billion people. Living standards will drastically drop which will make folks work harder again. In a generation or two we will be back ruling the world. Yes, a police dictatorship would be needed, but we are almost there anyway.

    Perhaps this is what they plan?

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 27 2018, @01:53AM (5 children)

      by c0lo (156) on Saturday October 27 2018, @01:53AM (#754328) Journal

      Perhaps this is what they plan?

      "They" who?

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @02:53AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @02:53AM (#754343)

        > "They" who?

        Hey, get with the program, conspiracy theory doesn't require any basis in reality, so "they" is a perfectly good name for "them".

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Saturday October 27 2018, @04:23AM

          by c0lo (156) on Saturday October 27 2018, @04:23AM (#754365) Journal

          Sorry, I'm still lingering in the "The Man" stage.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0

      • (Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:12AM (1 child)

        by legont (4179) on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:12AM (#754374)

        What's the difference? I mean do you have a better proposal? Short of nuking China, of course. One can't seriously propose to have 5 times higher productivity; not for long anyway.

        There is a third way - the old British idea - to split China into a number of coastal republics and poor interior, but my gut feeling they - Chinese commies I mean - would resist.

        So, which conspiracy theory sounds better?

        My personal opinion is that the US should stop "solving this problem" as well as "other problems" out there and quit being an empire and become a normal country. Great, but not the first. We are too small to be the first.

        --
        "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.

        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 27 2018, @06:54AM

          by c0lo (156) on Saturday October 27 2018, @06:54AM (#754386) Journal

          What's the difference?

          The difference is the crocodiles are more green?

          I mean do you have a better proposal?

          I just asked the question. Let me rephrase: who are "they" in "Perhaps this is what they plan?".

          And all I got a wall of text that doesn't makes sense to me in the context.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 27 2018, @06:49AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday October 27 2018, @06:49AM (#754385) Journal

        Well, They of course. You don't know Them? Of course you don't; that's the point of a conspiracy, right? :-)

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.