Iron Man 3: Extremis and Ray Baughman's Carbon Nanotubes

By now the general consensus is that the third Iron Man movie, due out May 2013 (is it too early to camp out for the midnight showing?) will cover, in some form, the Extremis storyline from the Iron Man comic book circa 2005. What was Extremis? Carbon nanotubes. An injection of special carbon nanotubes "rewrote" the brain's internal map of the human body. The person injected then went into a coma, formed a cocoon of scar tissue, and emerged 2 or 3 days later a super-enhanced, fire-breathing, hyper-aggressive killing machine. 

With Guy Pearce confirmed as Aldrich Killian, the inventor of Extremis, and Rebecca Hall as Dr. Maya Hansen - Extremis' co-creator, the plotline is fairly evident. In the Extremis storyline, the Mandarin plans to infect everyone on earth with the Extremis serum. Ben Kingsley is playing Mandarin in Iron Man 3...will we see a similar plot?

In any case, the point I wanted to make was that the Extremis storyline came out in 2005 and was based around carbon nanotubes, which at the time (was 2005 really that long ago...?) were still a nebulous, fantastic substance with unknown but seemingly magical and endless properties. The future belonged to carbon nanotubes! We'd be making superconductors out of it, bullet-proof clothing out of it, ultra-strong bridges out of it...people even speculated that it could be used in a space elevator ribbon. Ignorance vis-a-vis imagination.

I've written three or four times on here about the limiting factors of the Iron Man "highly advanced prosthetic": power supply, human machine interface, and artificial muscle.

And here's where the two arcs meet: Ray Baughman. Baughman is a researcher at the University of Texas in Dallas who has been turning seemingly useless (bear with me) carbon nanotubes into elaborate yarn. 

I've pointed to his research before. Now Baughman has apparently given up on his floating carbon nanotube aerogel sheets as an artificial muscle and is pursuing paraffin-wax impregnated carbon nanotube yarn. His latest research is promising. Apply heat (2,500 Celsius!) and the yarn contracts (technically it expands outward and by the law of conservation of matter the outward expansion causes a lengthwise contraction).

But you have to read these things carefully. Because there is always a catch. In the case of Baughman's nanotube yarn muscle, it is the contraction percentage that breaks the heart. By ramping the yarn up to 2,500 degrees Celsius he is only able to achieve a 7% contraction. By contrast, human muscle operates at a brisk 37 Celsius and contracts 30 - 40%. 

So the problem with the paraffin-impregnated nano-yarn is that you'd need a muscle five times as long in order to achieve human-analogue muscle contractions. Not to mention that you'd incinerate the human being using the artificial muscle just from the proximity to scorching substance.

Carbon nanotubes are really neat. There's still a lot to learn about them. Maybe Baughman will one day achieve the universally-sought goal of a reliable, cheap analogue to skeletal muscle. Maybe an injection of carbon nanotubes like Extremis will one day give us super-strength.

In the meantime, apparently they are toxic to aquatic creatures?

_