In America We Can Make Anything but Jobs
Researchers Make Tiny Radio From Nanotubes
By Julie Steenhuysen Reuters Monday, January 28, 2008; 5:04 PM
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Transistor radios tinier than a grain of sand, made using nanotechnology, can not only tune in to the traffic report, but may end up outperforming current silicon-based electronics, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
The researchers made the microscopic radios out of carbon nanotubes -- tiny strands of carbon atoms -- and say in theory they could lead to faster devices.
They overcame a series of obstacles that have defeated efforts to make nano-radios, including getting amplification, by making their devices on quartz wafers.
"Our goal is not to make tiny radios per se, but really to develop nanotubes as a higher-performing semiconductor," said John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois.
. . . "The radio itself is not interesting," Rogers said. "But the fact that we are at a point that we can do things like a radio is a good milestone for us."
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Score another home-run for America's unique and enviable ability to invent--no matter that we haven't enough science graduates. Somehow, we lead the world technologically.
At the same time, we can't find our butts with both hands when it comes to job creation--not Wal-Mart McDonalds jobs--the high-end skilled worker jobs that went the way of industry's off-shoring to cheaper climes.
The best idea that I have heard (and it's a Republican idea, so try not to be too suspect) is getting rid of and burying the income tax.
Well, that's just like those Republicans--trying to drown government in the bathtub and, if they can't give tax avoidance to all their buddies, then get rid of taxes altogether.
Mmmm. True enough. But those who support the Fair Tax make a pretty good case that the Income Tax as practiced in America merely lurches back and forth between special interests, costing us jobs, competitiveness and the off-shoring of wealth.
If America became the only industrialized nation in the West to offer a tax-free business environment (substituting a consumer tax)
our own corporations would come home again
foreign corporate headquarters and manufacturing facilities would flock after them
worker wages--real, middle-class, raise a family and build a home wages--would once again find themselves at home in America
and we might once again become a lender-nation instead of a borrower-nation.
It's absurd that a country that can engineer transistor radios smaller than grains of sand, can no longer figure out how to prevail as a provider of good jobs and renewed middle class values.
We can do it. What's more, we must do it or simply fade from the company of the world's leading nations.