"As light as air, yet stronger than steel and bendier than rubber. A new material made from bundles of carbon nanotubes combines all of these characteristics in a substance that twitches like a bionic man's biceps when a voltage is applied.
The 'artificial muscle' is an aerogel — a lightweight, sponge-like material consisting mostly of air — drawn into a long ribbon.
Applying a voltage across the width of the ribbon electrically charges the nanotubes that thread through the material. This makes them repel one another, and the ribbon can expand sideways by up to three times its original width in an instant. "These muscles are remarkably fast," says Ray Baughman at the University of Dallas, Texas, who led the research.
The artificial muscle can expand about 4,000 times faster than human muscle does, says Baugman, and can be switched on and off up to 1,000 times a second with no deterioration (see video)."
These can be the swimming nano particles on our boat!
2 comments:
There's also a video about it, I edited it into your post.
I was just thinking, future robots will look much less Terminator-like than thought and much more organic than imagined. More like the robots from Blade Runner.
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