Nano Nano

Show of hands: who doesn’t know James has two immunity idols in his possession? Is there anyone on Survivor who doesn’t? I’ve lost track, but it seems to me a little bit short-sighted of the contestants not to get rid of him last night, which was probably their one and only chance to blindside him. Jean-Robert was annoying, but James is a huge threat (even though he’s not really winning stuff). And who’d’ve thought that Paris Hilton would win an immunity challenge? I think someone should check out her barrel. (That sounds naughty—it isn’t. She doesn’t have a barrel.)

The two-hour C.S.I./Without a Trace crossover was intriguing but didn’t really cover new ground the way I’d hoped. It was neat to see the perspective of one set of characters on the other, but the story didn’t really grip me. It was okay, but I was hoping for more. The one shining moment was Sara’s scene, which lays another brick in the groundwork leading up to her departure…next week, I guess. Law & Order: CI was quite good, on the other hand. Do we really know anything about Falacci? The parting comments about going home to her husband and kids seemed like subterfuge. I like her moxie, and her palpable confusion when she oversteps her bounds.

Yesterday I had a tour of the nanotechnology lab at Rice University, the home of buckyballs and the place where Nobel Prize winner, the late Richard Smalley made his discoveries. The big interest these days is in carbon nanotubes, which look like soot but are valued at hundreds of dollars per gram. Imagine taking the top and bottom off a soccer ball and then just extending the pattern on zillions of time to make a tube. These materials have interesting chemical and physical properties, from amazing electrical conductivity to tensile stregth that puts just about everything else to shame. There is one fundamental problem the scientists are trying to solve—if they do, they’ll be able to print money. The problem is that there are dozens of variations possible when these nanotubes form (in high pressure carbon dioxide atmosphere at about 1000°), but they have no way to control which variant they produce and some have more desirable traits than others. If they could find a recipe that allowed them to produce pure nanotubes of particular geometries, they’d have the world by the tail.

Not just March, by the way:

William Shakespeare

Beware the Bev of March.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:


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