Nano Radio!

A working radio, built from a single nanotube! Even cooler, the first song transmitted was the Star Wars theme.

Small world tidbit: Alex Zettl taught me third semester intro physics at Berkeley, which covered quantum mechanics and particle theory. I'll always remember his practical demonstration of quantum tunnelling. He was complaining about how all these educational catalogs had these expensive mockups to demonstrate an energy wave state propagating across material that it should not be able to, and he said, all of them were wrong anyway. So, he brought in an amp meter and a AA battery. He said, "You want to see quantum tunnelling? There!" He touched the probe to the battery node, and the amp meter beeped. He told us that quantum tunnelling happens all the time, because of the small layer of oxidized metal on top of every common conductor. There was no need to bring in some heavy aquarium to show a wave hit a wall and then continue on the other side of a separator with air in it. The wave went around the air pocket by being transfered by the aquarium glass anyway, so that sucked. But whenever you plug your earphones into your walkman (this was 1995, okay?), quantum tunnelling allows the current to carry across a non-conducting material. Zettl was known as a top dog in solid state physics at the time, so I guess he still is. I wonder if he still has the best mustache in Birge Hall.