What would you do with a noodle bowl that you can only see via a microscope? Well you certainly can’t use it for serving lunch that’s for sure. But you can use it to develop a whole lot of futuristic medical technologies and electronic gizmos. And that’s exactly what drove Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao and his team of Tokyo University students to create a Japanese style ramen bowl out of nanotubes that measure about one ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair. Actually, they created it way back in December 2006 but unveiled the project only at a microphotography competition last week for reasons best known to them only. Anyhow, the developers used carbon-based material and nanotube-processing technology to create the bowl and even threw in a string of ‘noodles’ measuring one-five-hundredth of a millimeter in length and one-50,000th of a millimeter in thickness. And no, they did no do this just for kicks or as a part of a geeky joke about combating world hunger. Apparently the nanotube has some pretty kickass physical properties like strength greater than steel which, of course could be utilized to make a hell lot of cool stuff in the future like gaming console covers that can survive a 40-foot drop!
Source: The Age
