By Sarah Webb
Despite all the hubbub about carbon nanotubes as possible building blocks of superstrong materials or as components of supersmall electronics, few practical applications have yet come to fruition. Integrating nanotubes into functioning electronic devices has proved especially difficult, but researchers have now built a carbon-nanotube component into a simple radio receiver.
“We’re showing a system that works that has a nanotube as one of the key components,” says Peter Burke of the University of California, Irvine.