It hopes to do this by extending a manufacturing technique, called "roll-to-roll" processing, so that it can be used to make computer components currently made in the form of silicon chips.Roll-to-roll, as its name suggests, involves winding a continuous roll of flexible material (such as paper, plastic or metal foil) from one spool to another.
Bigger ones produce all the boost required, but are slow to spool up to speed.
Ribbons of steel a metre wide and half a hair's width thick spool through vacuum chambers in which they are sputtered with copper, indium, gallium and selenium collectively known as CIGS.
Dr Stone imagined an alternative solution in Mexico in 2008.Laser focusAfter slipping into "one of these little Zen states" while watching a fibre-optic data link spool out as DepthX sank into a sinkhole, Dr Stone wondered if the link could carry enough photons, generated by a laser on the ground above, to heat a penetrator to an ice-melting temperature.
Dr Rubenok and her team have tested their version of the scheme on a spool of optical fibre more than 80km (50 miles) long, and also on 18km of working cable installed in Calgary.
This approach involves unwinding a filament of thermoplastic material from a spool and feeding it through a moving extrusion nozzle, heating the material to melt it and deposit it in the desired pattern on the build tray.
Most nanofibres are only nanometres in length as well as width, but the longest one made by Dr Yu stretches for half a metre and he only stopped there because he got fed up with winding it up on a spool only a few millimetres in diameter.
Superchargers are better in only one respect: they do not suffer from "turbo lag" (the time taken for a turbocharger to spool up to speed) for the simple reason that they have no turbine.
Bigger ones produce all the boost required, but are slow to spool up.
A spool of lies to assistants in high-end retail, to estate agents of plush apartments, to work colleagues and to her boyfriend eventually begins to unravel.
(Cutting modern 35mm film to form a tongue that fits in the take-up spool of the old rangefinder camera is becoming too much of a chore).
