Nanotube Paint Blocks Cell Phones on Demand

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Newsday is reporting on a new nanotube paint that is able to block cell phone signals on demand. The nanotubes are filled with copper, suspended in paint, and can be applied to the walls and ceiling of places such as concert halls, churches, and classrooms."

Cool but

That's cool, but where do you get the tiny little paintbrushes?

You mean these?

That's cool, but where do you get the tiny little paintbrushes?

Here. [acs.org]

Just to prove that science is stranger than fiction :)

(Mod this interesting, if you want)

Re:Lead - Asbestos

I wonder if in 30 years the wonders of nanotubes will be a tragic tale like asbestos. Asbestos is a wonderful material with many useful applications, but that is not what most people think of...most of the general public thinks of lung cancer. Suspended in paint the small nanotubes will do no harm. How will that material age and what will be the environmental impact over time?

As a woodworker I am aware of the respiratory issues with small particles. Any time I see "X times smaller than a human hair" I think lung damage.

Re:People in movie theaters...

Sounds hazardous to me - little airborne filaments? Sounds like asbestos. Then again, I've done no digging at all to check, so I may be full of carp.

At any rate, it seems like overkill to a problem that should've been fixed by the GSM standard itself - built into the GSM standard there should've been a mechanism to receive "silcence flags" sent by local transmitters. Church/movie theathre simply needs to have a transmitter in the room. First-responders could have special cellphoness that ignore the "silence flag".

Re:People in movie theaters...

The problem here is that everyone is being punished equally by this paint. The situation that people are trying to address is people who leave their phones on ring and talk in the middle of a large room of people. The beating seems like a reasonable expression of democracy(mob rule against the person who elected himself a victim) in action. The people who may have a legitimate emergency interrupt them at any random time 24x7 often can take those calls without disrupting others. These people do not need to be punished. The paint does not differentiate between the two groups.

When my cell phone vibrates during a movie and I look at the number to determine if it should go to voicemail or if I should excuse myself, no one is inconvenienced. Of course, I'm also not leaving in the middle of a movie to talk to someone who wasn't polite enough to inform me ahead of time that they are planning an emergency, so I won't even stand up and bother anyone.

Illegal?

At least in the USA, cell phone jammers [globalgadgetuk.com] are illegal. Because this paint isn't emitting signals to accomplish the same purpose, could it be legal?

Re:Really cool..

You'd get nowhere in that lawsuit.

Cell phones are inherently unreliable, and the cell phone company itself makes no guarantee that your phone will work at any given time or any given place. Would you sue the cell phone company every time your phone fails to ring? Of course not.

People like you suck.

The new asbestos?

There may be some serious health risks [jnanobiotechnology.com] associated with nanotubes and other small particles. Hopefully the companies involved do thorough health risk assessments before putting it up everywhere.

no-can-do

What we really need is people with common sense/courtesy. Don't have an obnoxious ringtone. Don't talk on the phone in a movie theatre, etc.

My situation: I've got to wear a hospital pager 24/7. New movie theatre with signal-jamming capability? I can't go. Sure, I've got sense enough to keep it on vibrate, but i'm the minority. We have to resort to actually crippling the devices to keep people from being idiots.

can do the same with a sheet of copper mesh

What's the big deal here? The paint is conductive. The conductivity cannot be switched on and off, but by reading between the lines of TFA, they have an antenna inside the faraday cage which can selectively provide connectivity to the outside world. You can do the same thing with copper mesh (and I have, to make ultra-quiet recordings of microvolt biological signals) to create an entire room that is a faraday cage.

The only thing newsworthy is that this paint contains nanotechnology. Sure, that's nice. But the summary and title are misleading: The paint blocks, always. The additional antenna blocks on demand, and there's nothing special there.

RFID blocker

Could this be a way to block RFID signals? Wear clothes or a sticker made of this stuff over an embedded tag and people only see the signal when you press a button.