Friday, June 19, 2009

AT NANO SCALE, MAGIC HAPPENS

Thus says Justin Hall-Tipping, senior managing partner of NanoHoldings, LLC. His company is “a mixture of venture fund and operating company.” I was sent an article about this company and it’s partnership with Dr Carroll, a professor of physics at Wake Forest University and the nanotech research center at the university.

I also had the great fortune to see the light board mentioned in the article and pictured at right.

Nanotechnology is the understanding and manipulation of matter at dimensions between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Just for a comparison, a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick. We are talking MINISCULE! With this technology, science will be able to provide us with “super materials” capable of changing the global environment in a clean, organic way.

The lighted material generates no heat and is at least twice as efficient as fluorescent light. It is a thin-film device that can be custom-tailored to produce light of different color and flexible so that it can be shaped into all sorts of creative lighting applications. (The image in the picture is of the school mascot, The Demon Deacon).

The solar fiber cell is another new innovation mentioned in the same article. The film acts as an absorber and concentrator and can be applied to a variety of surfaces such as the whole roof of a house.

From the FiberCell website: “Each FiberCell subunit within the module can produce the operational voltage, so there is no need to connect the individual devices in series. Loss of a single cell does not dramatically affect the module performance.”

When we talk of a future without oil and other polluting substances, we aren’t talking about a distant future. In fact the future is here, now and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine the possibilities that are just around the corner…

5 comments:

  1. Rocky, are you trying to tell us that Nanotechnology is going to be HUGE?

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  2. Its actually nice when you can sit back and imagine a future of new ideas and everchanging possibilities and then hope that by changing the matrix we can change the conversation.

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  3. Sounds promising. Maybe I won't have to file that lawsuit against the oil companies for desecrating my ancestral burial grounds. We dinos don't get no respect!

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  4. Hopefully, the new young minds of physics will set the world on its ear in a good way.
    I for one love magic!

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