Android Actuators, Little by Little In Baughman's latest work,
done in collaboration with John Madden at the University of
British Columbia, the researchers made actuators out of carbon-
nanotube yarns. The yarns are created by first growing densely
packed nanotubes, each about 100 micrometers long. The carbon
nanotubes are then gathered from a portion of this field and
spun together into long, thin threads. The nanotube yarn can be
just 2 percent of the width of a hair--not even visible--but
upwards of a meter long. According to Baughman, spinning these
threads was "like hauling in a fish with an invisible line." In
his conference presentation, he described yarns that could
support loads 150 times greater than nanotube papers
could.Source. However, much work remains to be done in
developing the materials. For one thing, as greater loads are
applied to actuators, they can start to exhibit "creep"--that
is, they do not completely return to their original state with
successive cycles. Baughman says that before t