30 January 2010 | NewScientist | 17

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FED up with your MP3 player running out of juice? Maybe your shirt could help. A newly developed carbon-nanotube-based ink that can soak into fabrics could turn clothing into wearable batteries.

Yi Cui and colleagues at Stanford University in California created the ink, made with single-walled carbon nanotubes. The team dyed porous fabrics with the ink to create a conductive textile with very low resistance. The fabric maintained performance after repeated washes, suggesting that the ink is durable (Nano

Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl903949m).Cui says it’s possible to treat the

dyed material with an electrolyte to create a fabric capacitor capable of storing and releasing electrical charge. That, he says, means the technique could be harnessed to power wearable devices.

Enter the robot sound deskMUSICIANS will soon be able to deliver

a slick live performance without

employing an acoustic engineer – and

audiences won’t know the difference.

“A lot of what sound engineers do

is rule-based,” says Enrique Perez

Gonzalez , an electronic engineer at

Queen Mary University of London’s

Centre for Digital Music. So he and Josh

Reiss, also at the CDM, have created a

piece of software, called Automatic

Mixing , to take care of basic sound

engineering functions such as mixing

and switching channels.

The software ensures sounds don’t

distort by using an automatic gain tool

to adjust signal levels from different

instruments or microphones. It can

also boost the bass or treble from

an instrument or vocal track by

increasing the strength of signals

from specific frequency bands.

Sounds from an instrument

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TECHNOLOGY

Power-up clothes with nanotube ink

can cancel each other out if they

are picked up by more than one

microphone, so the software inverts

the signals from offending sound

sources to stop this happening . Other

features include introducing slight

delays to align the instruments’

signals , spreading the sound signals

to generate a stereo effect and

an anti-feedback function .

However, the software is not

intended to replace sound engineers.

Instead, it should allow them to

concentrate on more creative tasks ,

says Reiss. It will be launched at

the Audio Engineering Society

Convention in London in May.

THE molecular equivalent of a Venus flytrap could capture water-borne nuclear waste.

So say Mercouri Kanatzidis and Nan Ding from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. They have synthesised a sulphide-containing material with a flexible structure that mimics the flytrap’s jaws.

The structure has “windows” measuring 0.8 nanometres by0.3 nanometres – just large enough for caesium ions to squeeze through. Once inside, the caesium bonds with sulphide ions, and this changes the material’s structure in

Hot waste? Call in the nano-trap

a way that closes the windows and traps the caesium.

“The trigger for closing the trap comes from the caesium-sulphide interactions in the material,” says Kanatzidis. Even if other ions such as sodium are present, they bond so strongly to water molecules that they can’t react with the sulphide, he says (Nature Chemistry, DOI: 10.1038/nchem.519).

Kanatzidis thinks the flytrap could be used to trap radioactive caesium at nuclear disposal sites.

It’s elegant chemistry, says Alan Dyer at the University of Salford, UK, but it’s unclear if it could perform as well as existing materials. “I’d want a lot more comparative studies to see what its true worth was,” he says.

–A thing of the past?–

books could be stored on a single cartridge made using a new type of storage tape developed by IBM and Fujitsu

35m

Dirk Smit of Shell’s exploration R&D arm acknowledges that the company’s airborne detector,

designed to spot oil deposits by the methane they release, may face problems in heavily

populated areas where cattle are raised (Forbes.com, 21 January)

“Over Holland, you’d just find how many cows there are”

“The software should allow sound engineers to concentrate on more creative tasks”