[OKDXA] Yeah, But Does It Shoot Skip On The CB?

[John Geiger]

Not sure how you would tune it for maximum swing
either.

73s John AA5JG

--- AC5UP <ac5up at windstream.net> wrote:

> Cal physicists make a radio 10,000 times thinner
> than a human hair
> Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
> Thursday, November 1, 2007
> 
> Physicists at UC Berkeley say they have produced the
> world's smallest 
> radio out of a single carbon nanotube that is 10,000
> times thinner than 
> a human hair.
> 
> Professor Alex Zettl led a team that developed the
> minuscule filament, 
> which can be tuned to receive AM or FM
> transmissions.
> 
> The first song it played? "Layla" by Derek & the
> Dominos. Eric Clapton's 
> unmistakable guitar riff can be heard on a scratchy
> recording of the 
> nanoradio's output posted by Zettl online.
> 
> Zettl said the device, built by graduate student
> Kenneth Jensen, is the 
> first radio within the size range of nanotechnology,
> which covers 
> inventions no larger than 100 billionths of a meter.
> The nanoradio is 
> 100 billion times smaller than the first commercial
> radios of the early 
> 20th century. It is a thousand times smaller than
> the most minute radios 
> in use today, which are based on silicon chip
> technology.
> 
> The research team has no commercial partners yet,
> but Zettl said the 
> practical applications of the nanoradio could
> include cell phones, 
> climate-monitoring systems and radio-controlled
> diagnostic probes that 
> could move through the human bloodstream.
> 
> "Maybe the kids will be wearing these instead of
> iPods, inside their 
> ears," Zettl said.
> 
> As long as 10 years ago, scientists had managed to
> build individual 
> components of a radio on the nanoscale, he said. But
> Zettl and his 
> colleagues figured out how to make a single nanotube
> perform all the 
> functions of a radio: It serves as an antenna,
> tuner, amplifier and 
> demodulator. The demodulator eliminates any
> frequencies from a radio 
> transmission except the signal to be played, such as
> a song.
> 
> "I hate to sound like I'm selling a Ginsu knife -
> 'But wait, there's 
> more! It also slices and dices!' - but this one
> nanotube does 
> everything," Zettl said.
> 
> The key to this feat was making the nanoradio work
> differently from 
> conventional radio electronics. The first step in
> that old technology is 
> to convert radio waves into pulses of electronic
> current. By contrast, 
> the nanotube absorbs the radio transmission and
> physically vibrates in 
> response, like a tuning fork or the tiny hairlike
> structures inside the 
> human ear. The filament has one end mounted in an
> electrode, but the 
> other end is free. Its vibrations change the
> patterns in an electric 
> field created by a battery. The varying electronic
> patterns become 
> sounds or music audible through headphones.
> 
> Jensen's choice for one of the first songs played on
> the nanoradio was 
> "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys.
> 
> But there is indeed more. The nanotube can also
> function as a 
> transmitter. Theoretically, thousands of nanoradios
> distributed through 
> the air or in the bloodstream could send back
> signals about air quality 
> or the state of a patient's cells, Zettl said.
> 
> Carbon nanotubes are immensely strong compounds made
> of carbon atoms 
> linked in a structure that looks like chicken wire.
> The carbon sheets 
> can be formed into hollow tubes. Zettl's research
> team tweaked the 
> nanotube structures and found that multi-walled
> cylinders - tubes within 
> tubes - were better for picking up AM and FM
> transmissions. 
> Single-walled nanotubes were best for receiving the
> frequencies used in 
> cell phones.
> 
> The team built a transmitter in the lab based on
> conventional 
> electronics, and first proved that the nanoradio
> could pick up and play 
> "Layla" about 10 months ago. But the scientists held
> the news for 
> publication in the journal Nano Letters, which
> posted it online on 
> Wednesday. Along with Jensen and Zettl, the
> co-authors of the paper were 
> UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Jeff Weldon and
> physics graduate student 
> Henry Garcia. The project was funded by the National
> Science Foundation 
> and the Department of Energy.
> 
> This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San
> Francisco Chronicle
> 
>
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/01/BUTBT44A2.DTL&type=business
> 
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> 


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