Flashing Ink: The laws of physics do tell us that it wouldn’t flash indefinitely without some kind of power supply. I suppose, though, it’s at least, from a naive physics point of view, theoretically possible that light falling on the paper could provide enough energy. However, a chemist may be able to prove it impossible.
Re: Spider dragline silk
Getting closer…
http://www.mos.org/cst/article/2898/1.html
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SU/spider.html
Bippy: Sorry, I should have been more specific: You can’t make a foam lighter than an equal volume of hydrogen (or helium), because even if the atomic mass of the solid is the same as the atomic mass of hydrogen, the density of the solid is greater than the density of the gas (by definition). As it turns out, for real materials, you can’t make a foam with less than twice the density of a balloon filed with a gas. So, no foam we could possibly construct would be less dense than air and be rigid. Now, if you had a material with infinite strength, you could make a thin shell and pump out the inside to a high vaccuum - and since the shell is infinitely thin, it has no mass, and neither does the volume it encloses. But that’s in the category of Physics 1 experiments where you negelect air resistance, friction, and the mass of the pendulum - it couldn’t ever happen in the real world, but it’s a nice thought exercise.
Slightly OT: Hydrogen isn’t a problem for blimps and the like - it does diffuse through most fabrics quite easily, but this problem has been solved. Older lighter-than-air craft had coated lift cells. Modern ones have lift cells made from Mylar or something similar - it’s incredibly light and gas-tight. And the lift cells themselves aren’t pressurized beyond the ambient atmosphere. If you get a rip, the hydrogen doesn’t go whistling out - it diffuses slowly. Since the leaking hydrogen is much less dense than the surrounding air, and isn’t restrained by the lift cell, it goes up rather quickly, and is very hard to ignite.
What killed airships was the Hindenburg, but that wasn’t the fault of the hydrogen - the Hindenburg would have burned just as merrily had he been filled with helium. What caused that disaster was the coating of the lift cells. It was a mixture of cellulose acetate (highly flammable), and aluminum powder (also highly flammable). The aluminum was supposed to eliminate static buildup (it didn’t).
Back to the matter at hand (pun intended):
Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor: Not possible with our current knowledge of physics. You can’t decrease the entropy of a photon (thus raising its frequency from radio to visible) by reflection or other operations. There is some interesting research going into nanostructures that seem to be able to confine radiated photons to very specific wavelengths, however - which would let us have 90%+ efficient lightbulbs, for one thing.
eburacum45: Not only that, but antimatter has some very interesting magnetic properties at very low temperatures - it’s not just a “mirror image” of normal matter. Working with more than a few atoms of antimatter at one time is colossally difficult, though.
Ale: It’s called the Czochralski process, and it’s way cool to do in the lab. We made a single silicon “boule” 20mm across and over 500mm long for a class last year. I have a polished 3mm slice of it on my wall - it’s really neat.
My personal thought on monopoles is that they probably don’t exist - I am not a physicist, but my reading of the theory is that it might be possible to have a magnetic monopole, but there’s really no way to verify the theory, other than finding one. It’s like antigravity - one of those things that we’ll never stop looking for, just because it would be so incredibly useful.
Powdered blood:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3207291.stm
Just add water. Really. It’s almost synthetic blood. It has no living cells in it (and supposedly carries oxygen better than real blood does), but you still need to make it FROM real blood (human or another mammal).
Thankyou very much SteelWolf.
Darn, so I won’t ever get to play with lighter than air polystyrene type substance.
Better Known as Saphire, the stuff Emeralds and Rubies are made of.
Makes the low friction bearing in chronometers with “jewels”, also extremely durable…some auto manufacturer created a motor cylinder of saphire to observe internal combustion as it occurs.
My idea for a material is some kind of alloy based on metals which would separate out in gravity, therefore a smelting forge would need to be in 0g orbit.
Or, on a “help the 3rd World/Low Tech” route…a stainless steel alloy you can make in a very primitive blacksmith’s forge.
Merely reducing the rate at which hand tools are lost to rust would help most cultures.
Doesn’t need to flash indefinitely, maybe only as littlle as a minute or two after the junk mail envelope is opened - energy could be supplied by some kind of chamical reaction that requires exposure to air (i.e. we’d have to design the envelope to be airtight.
Spider silk can now be produced in large quantities. Still not large enough to make spider silk bullet proof vests readily available. All this is thanks to genetic engineering.
Only one type (dragline silk, as a prev. poster mentioned), IIRC. The other, stronger variety spiders produce still eludes us.
Let me get this clear: you actually want the paper equivelent of the <blink> tag?!
Synthetic diamonds indistinguishable from natural ones and in almost any shape you want.
Motorola says they’ve figured out how to make nanotubes cheaply.
Bosda, stainless steel actually isn’t all that expensive to make (it’s only a few cents more than ordinary steels), the real problem is that it’s a bitch to machine. That’s where the expense comes in. A stainless steel that was as easy to produce (most of the aspects of new alloys come not from changing the composition of the alloys, but by changing the process by which they’re made) and was as easy to machine (and stainless steel is hell on something as simple as a belt grinder) as ordindary steels would have the benefits your seeking.
I recall an article about the industrial uses of space technology that itemized two technologically very possible but impossible-to-build-on-Earth items:
-
Perfect ball bearings. All ball bearings made in a 1g environment are very slightly metallurgically deformed by Earth’s graviational field. In a microgravity (free fall) environment geometrically perfect ball bearings would be possible.
-
Alloys. Several metals cannot be made to alloy with each other in any achievable terrestrial environment. But they would theoretically be erffective alloys, stable and with useful properties, if they could be made to alloy in the first place. Conditions in space are such as to permit that alloying. Not having a good grasp of alloy mettallurgy, I don’t know what specific alloys these are – but perhaps someone else does.