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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @05:46PM
Rather than casting this as a conflict between communism and democracy, I would describe the act of publication as an act of community - not communism, rather COMMUNITY.
Democracy, socialism, communism all spring from a desire to create and maintain a sense of community. They differ in how to handle the power that accrues. We're still figuring that out, as a species. There may be no right answer - so much derives from the characteristics of the specific individuals in any given circumstance.
We get lost in the emotional reactions inflicted by the sequences of vowels and consonants we utter at one another and lose sight of the underlying concepts. Many of us never even see the underlying concepts in the first place, for lack of education or opportunities to reflect.
And so I repeat: what you see is a sense of responsibility to and participation in the world scientific community. The exchange of ideas, in reputable journals, in pursuit of eternal and objectively verifiable truths.
The Chinese have an excellent grasp of world society's needs and they are creating the future. We watch entertainment; they study how to improve themselves and their society.
The Chinese have their own problems. They have learned from our mistakes because they cannot afford to repeat them; it would be catastrophic to inflict some of the things humans have done, using a population of billions - and the Chinese are seeing this, today, and working to develop better solutions.
They have bigots. They have nationalists. They have prejudice, and class struggles, and obscene wealth, and poverty, and corruption.
These things - bigotry, prejudice, class, corruption, poverty - are the real enemies.
We should all be working together to address poverty and illiteracy.
No rocket science is required to see this obvious and eternal truth.
My $0.02; YMMV; etc.
~childo