With the 10-fold increase, a high-quality version of the movie "The Matrix" could be sent in a few seconds rather than half a minute over the current Internet2 and two days over a typical home broadband line.

President
Vladimir Putin on Friday renewed criticism of U.S. plans to deploy a missile shield in Eastern Europe, saying Russia would take "appropriate measures" to counter the system.

Sun 19 Nov 2006
Carbon nanotechnology in an 17th century Damascus sword
Posted by Ed Yong under Nanotechnology , Technology

The Damascus swords of the Middle East were legendarily sharp, strong and flexible. Now, an analysis of one of these weapons under an electron microscope reveals that the key to its properties is nanotechnology, inadvertently used by blacksmiths centuries before modern science.

In medieval times, crusading Christian knights cut a swathe through the Middle East in an attempt to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims. The Muslims in turn cut a swathe through the invaders using a very special type of sword, which quickly gained a mythical reputation among the Europeans.

These ‘Damascus blades’ were extraordinarily strong, but still flexible enough to bend from hilt to tip. And they were reputedly so sharp that they could cleave a silk scarf floating to the ground, just as readily as a knight’s body.

These superlative weapons gave the Muslims a great advantage, and their blacksmiths carefully guarded the secret to their manufacture. The secret died eventually died out in the eighteenth century and no European smith was able to reproduce their method.

Now, Marianne Riebold and colleagues from the University of Dresden have uncovered the startling origins of Damascus steel using a technique unavailable to the sword-makers of old – electron microscopy.

Damascus blades were forged from small cakes of steel from India called ‘wootz’. All steel is made by allowing iron with carbon to harden the resulting metal. The problem with steel manufacture is that high carbon contents of 1-2% certainly make the material harder, but also render it brittle.

This is useless for sword steel since the blade would shatter upon impact with a shield or another sword. Wootz, with its especially high carbon content of about 1.5%, should have been useless for sword-making. Nonetheless, the resulting sabres showed a seemingly impossible combination of hardness and malleability.

Riebold’s team solved this paradox by analysing a Damascus sabre created by the famous blacksmith Assad Ullah in the seventeenth century, and graciously donated by the Berne Historical Museum in Switzerland.

They dissolved part of the weapon in hydrochloric acid and studied it under an electron microscope. Amazingly, they found that the steel contained carbon nanotubes (see left), each one just slightly larger than half a nanometre. Ten million could fit side by side on the head of a thumbtack.

Carbon nanotubes are cylinders made of hexagonally-arranged carbon atoms. They are among the strongest materials known and have great elasticity and tensile strength. In Riebold’s analysis, the nanotubes were protecting nanowires of cementite (Fe3C), a hard and brittle compound formed by the iron and carbon of the steel.

Here is the answer to the steel’s special properties – it is a composite material at a nanometre level. The malleability of the carbon nanotubes makes up for the brittle nature of the cementite formed by the high-carbon wootz cakes.

It isn’t clear how ancient blacksmiths produced these nanotubes, but the researchers believe that the key to this process lay with small traces of metals in the wootz including vanadium, chromium, manganese, cobalt and nickel. Alternating hot and cold phases during manufacture caused these impurities to segregate out into planes.

From there, they would have acted as catalysts for the formation of the carbon nanotubes, which in turn would have promoted the formation of the cementite nanowires. These structures formed along the planes set out by the impurities, explaining the characteristic wavy bands, or damask (see image at top), that patterns Damascus blades.

By gradually refining their blade-making skills, these blacksmiths of centuries past were using nanotechnology at least 400 years before it became the scientific buzzword of the twenty-first century.

The ore used to produce wootz came from Indian mines that were depleted in the eighteenth century. As the particular combination of metal impurities became unavailable, the ability to manufacture Damascus swords was lost.

Now, thanks to modern science, we may eventually be able how to replicate these superb weapons and more importantly, the unique steel they were shaped from.

...high-carbon wootz cakes.

"If somebody can make a map like that of the whole school, I mean, it does kind of scare me a little bit, and make me wonder, you know, what else they could do."

They are really just freedom fighters, fighting those that would restrict their freedoms.... the US!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6645179.stm

Nasa unveils Hubble's successor


The US space agency Nasa has unveiled a model of a space telescope that scientists say will be able to see to the farthest reaches of the universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is intended to replace the ageing Hubble telescope.

It will be larger than its predecessor, sit farther from Earth and have a giant mirror to enable it to see more.

Officials said the JWST - named after a former Nasa administrator - was on course for launch in June 2013.

The full-scale model is being displayed outside the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in the US capital, Washington DC.

'Birth of the universe'

The $4.5bn (£2.27bn) telescope will take up a position some 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth.

It will measure 24m (80ft) long by 12m (40ft) high and incorporate a hexagonal mirror 6.5m (21.3ft) in diameter, almost three times the size of Hubble's.

Hubble, launched in 1990, has sent back pictures of our solar system, distant stars and planets, and remote fledgling galaxies formed not long after the Big Bang.

But scientists say the JWST will enable them to look deeper into space and even further back at the origins of the universe.

"Clearly we need a much bigger telescope to go back much further in time to see the very birth of the universe," said Edward Weiler, director of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre.

Martin Mohan of Northrop Grumman, the contractor building the telescope, said that the team was making excellent progress.

"There's engineering to do, but invention is done, more than six years ahead of launch," he said.

When ready, the JWST will be launched by a European Ariane V rocket. It is expected to have a 10-year lifespan.

Until then, the 17-year-old Hubble telescope will continue to do its work. Nasa plans to send astronauts on the space shuttle to service it in 2008.