Japanese researchers took a break from constructing robot exoskeletons for kids and new and scary ways to incorporate your nonexistent anime girlfriend into your life to design an alloy with properties similar to palladium.

Palla-what, you may be asking, or simply wondering why the Japanese recreated a terrible music venue in Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s a rare-earth element mostly used in electronics. Since it’s scarce, that means it’s worth a lot, $800 per troy ounce at current market prices, and the Japanese dislike relying on the war-torn nations that generally provide the stuff for a steady supply.

Hence, they used nanotechnology to make it. Rhodium and silver were reduced to their atoms, and given heated alcohol to combine at the atomic level.

Man, we’ve got to try that heated alcohol, we haven’t combined at the atomic level in weeks.

[ via the minglers at SlashGear ]

The Tobacco mosaic virus is probably something you’ve never heard of, but it’s going to make your gadgets run a lot longer.

The key with any battery is to get as much surface area on the electrode as possible to gather as many electrons as possible. How’s a virus helping with that?

Well, by modifying the gene slightly, putting a film on the electrode and letting the virus do what comes naturally. It builds nanorod structures on the electrode, expanding the surface area to ridiculous lengths. How ridiculous?

Try ten times as efficient. Yep, your laptop is about to become that much more awesome, and my netbook is officially usable beyond an hour once these things come out. We love the future!

[ via the tobacco lovers at Engadget ]

Good . . . Better . . . BEST!

It’s going to take all my willpower to not turn this post into a barrage of emo bashing jokes, but I’ll try. For science.  Ten researchers at NASA have created a paint that is ten times blacker than the previously blackest paint. It’s made out of carbon nanotubes on a titanium backing.

The new material will be used to coat the guts of cameras and telescopes in space. Right now, these instruments use NASA’s Z306 paint, a pitch black painting that reduces photon contamination by absorbing errant light.  According to NASA, this light “has a funny way of ricocheting off instrument components and contaminating measurements.” [Gizmodo]

The paint they currently use, Z306, isn’t dark enough, as 40% of the data captured by instruments is contaminated by errant light.  The new carbon nanotube paint absorbs light awesomely well, soaking up 99.5% of all ricocheting light.  Hit the jump for other “improvement simulations” for this amazing paint:

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Why, yes, we intentionally went out of our way to write the weirdest headline we could think of for this news story, but it’s 100% true. A bunch of Canadian scientists, specifically the guys up at the Nanorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, have figured out how to make certain bacteria do their bidding.

It works because the bacteria are “magnetotatic”, which means they swim in the direction of a magnetic field. So it’s fairly easy to manipulate them into moving around small blocks of epoxy and get them to build simple structures.

This may sound pretty goofy and pointless, but it’s not. This is actually a major step forward for nanotechnology. This is a proof of concept: we can actually do the stuff that heretofore was limited mostly to cyberpunk novels and hand-wringing by fundamentalists who barely grasp how robots work but can understand the term “gray goo”. Now it’s just a matter of making it effective. Check out the video under the jump and marvel at how kinda gross the future looks.

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MRSA, better known as the disease that can resist current antibiotics, is a pretty nasty disease that kills, and is especially feared in hospitals, since they’re full of people with holes in them and who have crappy immune systems. Fortunately, there’s hope for reducing infections, thanks to paint.

OK, actually, it’s thanks to a coating developed by a team led by the unfortunately named Jonathan Dordick at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute. The coating, which can be mixed with pretty much anything you apply to a surface, not only kills MRSA on contact, it’s also not fatal to any other microbe, won’t hurt human cells, doesn’t clog, and will also buff your car, it’s that good.

It works by combining the wonder substance carbon nanotubes with an enzyme called Lysostaphin, which is the product of millions of years of us needing to wipe the floor with Staph infections. The bugs touch the coating, meet the enzyme, and die like a good show on Fox. It’s more than 99% effective after 20 minutes of contact, and likely the RPI team has saved countless lives. Provided, of course, Purell doesn’t nuke them from orbit to protect their business.

[ via GizMag ]

There are some jokes we’re above using. “Halo” jokes aren’t among them.

Anyway, the “teabag” we’re referring to is not, in fact, the fratboy’s favorite taunt on Live, but an actual, honest-to-goodness teabag. Well, it’s not really a tea bag because there’s no tea in it, but it’s the same principle. Except in reverse, actually, because you dip it in brown water and it…you know what, this analogy has failed at every level. Let’s just explain what it does.

You fill a bottle of water and insert this bag in the neck, and the contents, nanofibers and carbon granules, go to work. The nanofibers clean out the contaminants, and the carbon wipes the floor with any bacteria. You just drink the water through the neck of the bottle, and through the filter, and it takes care of everything. Best of all, it costs half a penny; relief organizations can turn out these things by the millions for dirt.

Video of this wonder filter after the jump:

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