Good to know the musak is covered - now for those pesky nanotubes...

Space elevator musak to feature Coolio, 50 Cent - TehMockeryz

This is just an interesting little piece about space elevator musak -- what I glean from it is that there are folks invested enough in the space elevator concept to go ahead with something a tad bit more frivolous... I'm not knocking their efforts - rather I'm commending them for doing something they can do.

notable: this piece is associated with University of Texas' NanoTech Institute.

What's The Nano Market?

$1 trillion by 2015? $3 trillion by 2017? Sky's the limit, it seems according to an article by Michael Berger about the widely varying figures for the global market for nano products. Concluding that such estimates can be "an irritating, sensationalist and unfortunate" approach to estimating economic worth, Berger asks that these predictions include a dose of reality along with some explanation of how the figures are generated.

Single-Atom Thick Carbon

Today's Science section in the New York Times has an article about the fabrication and properties of graphene, a carbon structure that is a single atomic layer thick. Especially interesting are the low-tech methods of fabricating it (adhesive tape is part of the process) and the interesting properties. Graphene exhibits the quantum Hall effect, for instance. Also of note was the reluctance one researcher recalled for the NSF to fund his early graphene work which was, later, supported by Intel.