Toward the World's Smallest Radio
A graduate student of the University of California-Irvine demonstrates world's first working version of a carbon nanotube radio system. A report on this amazing device appeared in Nano Letters, one of the American Chemical Society's 36 peer-revewed scientific journals. This video was among supporting materials for the research paper.
Peter Burke and Chris Rutherglen developed a carbon nanotube "demodulator" that is capable of translating AM radio waves into sound. In a laboratory demonstration, the researchers incorporated the detector into a complete radio system and used it to successfully transmit classical music wirelessly from an iPod to a speaker several feet away from the music player. Nano is short for "nanometer," and that means small, so small that thousands of the carbon nanotube radio devices would fit across the diameter of a human hair. Video Copyright 2007, American Chemical Society (less info)