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Nanotubes Turn Heat into Firepower

Scientific American - Posted: September 20th, 2012, 3:21pm EDT

p One of the biggest barriers to advances in nanotechnology has manipulating objects at such a small scale. Scientists can make balls, rods and tubes that are only billionths of a meter in size and have developed techniques to get them to self assemble in different patterns but tweaking the structure of individual nano-scale particles without breaking them down has proved problematic./ppA technique for creating more flexible nanotubules that pulsate in response to temperature changes could help make these materials easier to work with and reveal new uses for them, according to a team of scientists from Korea#8217;s Seoul National University, Japan#8217;s Nagoya University and China#8217;s Harbin Institute of Technology. The researchers report in Science this week that they were able to use ring-shaped molecules to construct mini cylinders containing spherical carbon #8220;buckyball#8221; fullerenes. When exposed to rising temperatures, the cylinders constricted to about half their diameter, expelling the buckyballs in the process without fully collapsing. Drop the temperature a bit and the procedure could be reversed, expanding and pulling nanoparticles back into the nanotubule./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=nanotubes-turn-heat-into-firepower[More]/a

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