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Comment by dieselerator | Hacker News Reader

> “Our quantum friction theory provides the first reasonable explanation of what’s happening,” says Kavokine.

Now that a possible mechanism for water-carbon interactions is more clearly understood, there is great potential to harness the properties of nanoscale flows, he says. For example, there are proposals to develop new computer designs based on nanoscale water and ion transport.

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new computer designs? Am I reading that right? It seems like a large extrapolation to that application.

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> new computer designs? Am I reading that right? It seems like a large extrapolation to that application.

The first rule of pop-sci coverage is that your fundamental discovery/study needs to have an application. It doesn't matter that the application is utter bullshit, it just needs to be there, and to be flashy, and to get people talking.

So, you look at your buzzword bingo sheet until you can portmanteau some piece of nonsense and you add that to the article.

It's achieved its purpose, because we are now talking about it. The more we talk about it, the more we encourage this sort of click-bait bullshit.

Though fair to have a certain level of skepticism it is also important to think outside the box. A lot of technology has come from micro steps leading to bigger developments. I hear the Internal combustion engine was a spin off from perfume. The little spritzer atomized the perfume which led to the ability to do so with gasoline allowing the first engines to come to life. If these nanatubules with lead to a new computer design I don’t know but I am curious to see where the information leads to new discoveries.

Doesn't they mean they plan to build a "simulation" when saying computer design?

I doubt this is what the author is alluding to, but a few years ago[^1] I read a proposal about CPU cooling using small-scale fluid tubes, much like a car engine is cooled. This would allow cores to be stacked vertically, much like HBM memory is stacked today. Perhaps this new development could allow better implementations?

[^1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/researchers-demonstr...

Yeah I think so, too! If we can solve vertical stacking that would make an absolutely huge difference!

microfluidics is kind of like computers (integrated circuits) for liquids

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