New material to wrap HPA cylinders..

[Coaster]

About a month ago i read an article dealing with how people have been trying to figure out how to mass-produce spider silk and have failed many time. This article also talks about how strong it is( 5x that of steel and how light it is). Unfortionately i cannot find a link to the complete article, but i have a link that is a little preview of it: herepreview

Ok, i think that this would be an incredible thing to wrap HPA cyclinders with. 5 times as strong as steel and much, much lighter. Maybe this could be the way of the future for wrapping these cylinders. What do you guys think?

[Coaster]

i hope you can get that link working, it isn't working to repost it... you just copy from right after url= to the smiley(not including the smiley or the url=)

[MrMag]

an article like this was in the NY TIMES. the military is planning on using this silk to create bullet proof vests. it is stronger than the kevlar that is currently used, and much stronger and lighter.

i doubt that paintball will get the first crack at this stuff though

[Coaster]

very true. But once it goes down in price it might be an option

[than205]

Yes, I heard a report on NPR about this. They were interviewing a representative of a Bio company who had put a spider gene into a goat. They would get a silk from processing the goat milk. The upside is that they get a decent yield and it has most of the properties they were looking for. The downside seemed to be that it was somewhat stretchier than desired.
It's uses so far have been mostly medical applications. I believe the person being interviewed said that military applications were some time off in the future.


http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...dge020118.html


http://www.howstuffworks.com/news-item38.htm

[Pand0ra]

Nanotubes would be the best solution I think.
They are 100 times stronger than steel but only weigh about one-sixths as much.

I bet we'll start to see some applications of them within 10 years.

@++

[Butterfingers]

Its hard to polymerize carbon into nanotubes.

[Aranarth]

For some reason, I don't believe nanotubes will be used for hpa bottles anytime in the near future. Or for anything at all regarding paintball. On the other hand, I could see the electronics in our guns being compacted by nanotube applications.
-AranarthX

[Pand0ra]

You bet?

Right now the production is not higher than 100gr/year, but that's just because those things are new (in fact a part of the researches are done in an university here in Belgium, in Liège.).

As the most obvious application seems to be fibers, I bet they'll quickly be used in composite materials.

I don't think they'll reduce drastically the size of the electronics in the markers. The production is too low for that, and there's still room to do it with the current technologies (they're not even using the smallest components, to ease the maintenance).

@++

[Schnitzel]

as far as electronics go, has anybody heard about how somebody was successfully create a computer circuit using bacteria? imagine how small computers could get down to the cellular level...

[Coaster]

I have not heard of the bacteria one... but i have heard of DNA being hybridized so that it outputs 1's and 0's. This was in an article in Computer Power Users.

[ThePatriot]

Yep, anyone know about Quantum Computers? I heard something about them on TechTV and i think i have a basic understanding of what they are, but anyone an expert? Basically what I believe it does, is it is VERY small, and takes energy, and its speed, from each of the infinite universes.

They claim to have proof of infinite universes, which i think is really cool, i will explain what i heard about how it was proven. They took a huge piece of material, i heard it was cardboard, and cut little slits in it. It looked like this.

[||||| ||||||| ||||||| ||||]

Except the Slits were a lot thinner, then they shined a light from a flashlight through the slit, expecting it to land on the wall perpendicular to the slice. Well, it didnt, the light landed inbetween each slit, so they thought to themselves, hmmm..the light must be bouncing off other light particles eminated from the flashlight. So what they did is made a machine that spit out one light particle at a time, and they let it run for a year. It did the same thing, based on this they concluded that the light must be refracting off other light from different universes, that exist right with ours, just on different wavelengths and such.

Now, a Quantum computer takes energy from each of these univserses, and puts it into the speed, so it is infinetely fast. They made it do basic math(so i believe) and its very amazing, because you already have the answer before you finish inputting all the data, now i need an expert to help me on this one.

Woops...i just realized i posted this in Deep Blue, oh well...

[Aranarth]

As of right now, they are currently making simple transistors using nanotube technology. The advantages of these are they can switch on and off using a single electron.
For those that aren't familiar, a nanotube (simplified), is a very small tube, closed at both ends, made up of hexagonal grids of carbon atoms. They are very strong (lots of math, depending on how they are wound, but can be in excess of 100x stronger than steel).
If you have heard of buckyballs, imagine a buckyball that is stretched. And then you twist it to get various properties (such as making it a semiconductor). They are also testing to add impurity atoms to the carbon structure to see what kind of properties (electrical and otherwise) that it will produce.
Since you can make a semiconductor out of it, and since its so tiny (somewhere around 20nm long) heat losses are negligible. Thus you get very tiny, very efficient, computers. IBM has done tests with nanotubes to actually make logic circuits by imposing nanotubes onto gold elements with some good success.
There are also tests that I have read of that used single cobalt atoms, and other single atoms (don't remember) bonded together to make transistors also.
Overall, though, this tech rocks for electronics. Not sure if it applies to paintball right now though.
-AranarthX
PS: Quantum computers, as I understand, and I don't really understand, if you follow what I am saying , utilize a process contrasting our current type of computer as follows: current computers consist of a bunch of switches which have two states, on and off (1 & 0); quantum computers utilize 1 & 0 and states inbetween. Not exactly sure how they do it though. Current experimens with them do use very small bits of matter (one experiment used like 10 atoms manipulated by magnetism), but these experiments are of a very limited use for any computational output as of yet. I don't have any idea where they came up with alternate dimensions or universes powering them though.

[ThePatriot]

It is just what i heard, which is why i asked if anyone was an expert on the issue, to clarify whether or not i was correct.

[sniper1rfa]

current computers rely on binary, the ones and zeros we are all familiar with. these stand for two different states, on and off. this means everything has to be reproduced as a combination of 1's and 0's. quantum computing relies on electron states. all matter (protons, neutrons and electrons that is...) is made of a combination of 3 of 6 quarks. the six quarks are actually six "flavors" of the same particle (kinda). the states are up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. the theory is that we can use combinations of these six flavors to encode stuff, instead of combos of 1's and 0's. this would make computers 6 times faster and programs 6 times smaller, making run times 36 times shorter.

there is a new development that is somewhat related to this. its called SpinRAM. its based on the spin imparted by quarks on electrons. spin one way, you get on, the other way you get off. now remeber, electrons are really little and so there are lots of them around to use. they have made RAM chips the size of a credit card (you dont have enough money in your credit card limit to buy it, so dont ask...) that can hold something like 7 terabytes of information, and this is random acces memory, not a hard drive.


thats what i have gathered, of course, i doubt anyone on AO really truly understands how it works.

[mxracer33x]

In response to the original posting in this thread, I read this link today. Whats next? And who thought this up?

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...E13762,00.html

[Coaster]

thanks for that link, that is exactly what i heard about.

[Jesh679]

When you guys talk about Quantum Computers what you are really talking about is spintronics which uses electron spin to denote on and off. Pretty much how it works is it starts out with a long line of electrons and spins them all the same way then as they pass through a "processor" it switches them to the appropriate spin to signal a 0 or 1 which is then read later down the line by whatever device it is sent to. it isnt designed to speed things up only make them smaller.

[sniper1rfa]

yeah, thats the RAM bit i was talking about, but the other stuff is NOT "spintronics".

[ShooterJM]

MRAM is different then what is generally refered to quantam computers. You're looking at a device that has quite low power consumption and read/write access that rivels the fastest SRAM modules. You're looking at a 14 nanosecond access time, on a non volatile. Probably will revolutionize a few industries in the next few years. There are a few SBIRS contracts from the goverment already granted. Will be interersting to see how it all pans out.

As to quantam computers. There are differing opinions. Quite a few people tend to promote their having an amazing speed advantage (theoretically) over a classical binary computer. However, this is still theory. If anyone remembers the 1999 Nobel Prize winner, Hooft, the standard model of particle physics says that the laws of nature at the deepest levels return to the discrete in the classical bit. Some guy named Einstein agreed with him. Basically this asserts that quantam computing is actually much slower then a clasical computer bit. I'm not going to pretend to understand the electron on a pool of liquid helium model,or the fact that information on a quantam computer couldn't be copied, only teleported per se, but it is interesting. Very interesting.

Hehe in conclusion, wasn't it Bohr who said something to the tune of, "If your not astounded by quantam theory, you'll never understand it."