Official News - page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: ANCIENT NANOTUBES

by Hazed

Two seemingly unrelated facts:

During the middle ages, the crusaders from Europe found themselves up against Muslims armed with swords of Damascus steel, a type of steel alloy (also called Wootz) that is both hard and flexible, making it ideal for forging swords and knives. It garnered an almost mythical reputation - a Damascus steel blade was said to be able to cut a piece of silk in half as it fell to the ground, as well as being able to chop through normal blades, or even rock, without losing its sharp edge.

Carbon nanotubes are layers of graphite wrapped into tubes only a few nanometres in diameter. They are a spin-off from the discovery in 1985 that carbon could form stable, ordered structures other than graphite and diamond - including the wackily named buckminsterfullerene, or buckyballs. Nanotubes have novel properties such as extraordinary strength for their size and unique electrical properties. The potential for their use in all kinds of fields in enormous.

So what links these two bits of information, one from history, and one from modern high-tech science?

The link is that researchers from the Technical University of Dresden recently examined a 17th Century sword made from Damascus Steel under an electron microscope - and found clear evidence of carbon nanotubes!

Peter Pauflet and his colleagues suggest that the sophisticated process of forging and annealing the steel, which gave it its legendary quality, formed the nanotubes which could explain the sword's amazing mechanical properties.

Talk about two worlds colliding!

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