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scientific breakthrough at Rice University could boost our electricity supply without the construction of any additional power plants.

The CNT thread could become a preferred alternative to copper wires. Conductivity is so good that a tiny CNT light source may be capable of emitting light at levels rivaling that of existing incandescent or fluorescent bulbs while consuming substantially less power.

Like some tantalizing cursed treasure, boron nitride nanotubes have been tempting researchers with their promise of high heat tolerance, which makes them excellent candidates for components in the next generation of microscopic-scale high efficiency electronics.  But for years the tiny nanofibers, which are similar to carbon nanotubes, have lead researchers down one blind alley after another. tweetmeme_url="http://cleantechnica.com/2010/01/28/carpet-of-boron-nanotubes-could-lead-to-new-generation-of-nano-scale-electronics/"; The fact is that boron nanotubes are much harder to produce than carbon nanotubes.   They won’t catch on until that obstacle is overcome - and it seems that a team of researchers at Michigan Technological University has done just that.  Working with the same instrumentation used for carbon nanotubes, the team has developed a way to grow virtual “Persian carpets” of boron nitride nanotubes in the lab, paving the way for their commercial use.

Pure metallic carbon nanotubes could be the key to overhauling the electrical power grid with more efficient transmission lines - but only if they could be made in huge quantities and uniformly. Through a refined version of a technique called “amplification,” researchers at Rice University plan to make long and highly conductive nanotube fibers they dubbed “armchair quantum wire”  that could be woven into more efficient electrical transmission lines. They eagerly plan to generate a large quantity of this material by the end of summer. Aaron Franklin, a researcher at IBM’s Watson Research Center says that the update Rice study probably doesn’t reveal “the golden ticket for achieving high volumes of metallic-only tubes,” reports MIT Technology Review. We’ll just have to wait and see. Learn more.

Leveraging technologies developed under GE’s Nanotechnology Advanced Technology Program, they have fabricated a prototype substrate that can cool electronic devices such as a laptop computer twice as well as copper.