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Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

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11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#11
No evidence that the silk contains graphene, low n. Visually inspect the em cross section... Can you see a difference? The authors don't produce a quantitative measure of entropy in the pictures to justify the claim that they are different.

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#12
post #2

Use for a skyhook ? A skyhook is what? Dirt cheap way to mass into earth orbit. How? Put a weight on a string, attach the string at, maybe, the equator of earth, put the weight into orbit, and let the centrifugal force of the weight keep it in orbit and keep the string tight. Then to put mass into orbit, let it crawl up the string from electric power conducted from earth in the string. Main problem: Getting a suffici…

[deleted]

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#13
post #2

Use for a skyhook ? A skyhook is what? Dirt cheap way to mass into earth orbit. How? Put a weight on a string, attach the string at, maybe, the equator of earth, put the weight into orbit, and let the centrifugal force of the weight keep it in orbit and keep the string tight. Then to put mass into orbit, let it crawl up the string from electric power conducted from earth in the string. Main problem: Getting a suffici…

What if a plane gets tangled up in it?

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#14
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A skyhook is generally a space elevator that doesn't go all the way to the ground, and so doesn't have to be quite as precise about orbital velocity and the like.

I thought a skyhook was one of those things you send the apprentice kid to the stores for, like tartan pain, spirit level bubbles, long stands and a weight with no point? Maybe even a left handed screwdriver...

Pretty sure it's the thing in batman that allows troops to reverse skydive.

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#16
post #2

Use for a skyhook ? A skyhook is what? Dirt cheap way to mass into earth orbit. How? Put a weight on a string, attach the string at, maybe, the equator of earth, put the weight into orbit, and let the centrifugal force of the weight keep it in orbit and keep the string tight. Then to put mass into orbit, let it crawl up the string from electric power conducted from earth in the string. Main problem: Getting a suffici…

Main problem is more that there is no advantage to a skyhook if you're just putting things into orbit. Every kilo you lift with a skyhook pulls it down and it has to be used to de-orbit that mass, or lifted up by rockets or thrusters etc. Unlike an actual space elevator, or orbital ring, or launch loop, it doesn't hold itself at altitude.

Also, there's really no need for the tether to be conducting. For one, you could just use carbon fiber, or have a single conductor mixed in with tensile fibers, or just use a solar panel, or just spin the whole thing (which gives you the real advantage of bringing you up to orbital velocity)

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought a skyhook was one of those things you send the apprentice kid to the stores for, like tartan pain, spirit level bubbles, long stands and a weight with no point? Maybe even a left handed screwdriver...

Pretty sure it's the thing in batman that allows troops to reverse skydive.

You mean that thing by the CIA which was successfully tested in 1958, and later was a plot device in a Batman movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it's the thing in batman that allows troops to reverse skydive.

You mean that thing by the CIA which was successfully tested in 1958, and later was a plot device in a Batman movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...

Also on display much earlier in Thunderball and The Green Berets.

Re: Graphene-Fed Silkworms Produce a Super-Strong Silk That Conducts Electricity

#20
post #2

Use for a skyhook ? A skyhook is what? Dirt cheap way to mass into earth orbit. How? Put a weight on a string, attach the string at, maybe, the equator of earth, put the weight into orbit, and let the centrifugal force of the weight keep it in orbit and keep the string tight. Then to put mass into orbit, let it crawl up the string from electric power conducted from earth in the string. Main problem: Getting a suffici…

What if a plane gets tangled up in it?

Proposals were made around 1000 km altitude at the lower tip. Boeing proposed a 600km tether with a transfer altitude of 100km (at mach 10), and later increased that to 150 km. The Lockheed U-2 is one of the highest flying airplanes ever, our main cold war spy plane. It flew twice as high as a passenger jet, and cruised at 70,000 feet, just over 21 km.

Planes would not get tangled in it.

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