Wow, that looks creepily like the Gamma emmiter from the Hulk Movie.

So, they'll release these crystals into the wild and they'll absorb all the CO2 that plants need too? Then we'll have no O2 to breathe?

Nanoapocalypse!

No wonder so many people think nanotechnology is morally wrong.

These crystals won't be released into the wild. They'll be used in industrial applications like filters.

I'm worried that if released, they'd go on to munching carbon-based life forms!

@smcallah: Uhh Crystals are not nanotechonolgy..

I doubt the crystals are even made out of CO2, so it not some Ice9 scenario

"Want to see the cool machines that make these crystals?"

See, that's not really fair, because to answer that questions in the comments, I had to click on the post and see the machines. Also, I'm pretty sure you can get the one in the first picture at OfficeMax.

Then what do we do with all the bloated, carbon stuffed nano crystals? Do they catalyze the carbon or are they just storing it?

With our exceptionally feeble record for keeping various alien (used in the sense of foreign) lifeforms (killer bees, kudzu, med-flies, myriad pathogens, etc, etc etc) from spreading from their original habitats and rampaging in their new ones, I'm not very confident that "These crystals won't be released into the wild" at some point with the all to common "unintended consequences."

@Gyrus: Good question.

@Gyrus: Jenny Craig.

Argh... PEOPLE these are not crystals made out of CO2, they do not grow infinitely nor can they make new crystals...

They are crystalline CO2 sponges.
Do you worry that paper towels will get out into the wild and absorb all the water?
(scary but unlikely)

They seem to be just storage of CO2...
Maybe we can bury the in the ground and some future generation can dig them up and burn them.. oh wait that would be bad.

It is a carbon sink.

@Gyrus:These crystals are just a matrix to store CO2. They don't absorb it. Although one liter of these crystals can store ~80 liters of CO2, this is not exactly going to save us from greenhouse gases. That's less than half a kilogram of CO2 per liter. that's pretty close to how much CO2 is produced per kilowatt-hour in this country. You'd have to change out filters made of this stuff pretty damn quickly (like every few minutes or so) at a multi-megawatt coal plant......and the CO2 would still have to go somewhere. Bottom line, these crystals will have an application somewhere in removing CO2 from gas samples in a lab, but not for large scale projects.

@DocGratis:

Yes I do worry about escaped paper towels!

And killer tomatoes.

And the Blob.

And my personal gravity reversing itself and being hurled into the sky until I die of hypoxia.

You?

@Gopherit: So they store the CO2 and then have to let it out at some point? How does that work?

@Annalee Newitz: "These crystals won't be released into the wild. They'll be used in industrial applications like filters."

Yep. That's what they used to say... back in the days before the Great Accident...

@Annalee Newitz: That's a good question. The Science paper(subscription needed) Wired mentions doesn't talk much about the practical applications, only that several of the ZIF (zeolitic imidazolate framework) crystals they found very efficiently trap in CO2 preferentially in their molecular structure. I'd imagine they're a lot like clathrates. If you heat them up enough (the paper says the crystals are stable to around 300 degrees Celsius) the crystals will probably decompose and release the CO2 again.

@Annalee Newitz:
We don't have to let it out of the crystal.
We just have a crystal filled with CO2.

When a tree grows it fills with Carbon (from CO2 among other places), if the tree gets buried in a way where it doesn't break down to readily it becomes an inert carbon sink (until it turns into fossil fuel and some stupid culture digs it up and burns it)

In a simpler sense: Think of the earth as a closed carbon circuit. The excess CO2 in the air was in fossil fuels, we have to find away to put it back, or store it in an inert form. (or do something else with the carbon rather than let it be CO2 in the air).

If they are full of carbon could they be crushed into diamonds? Or turned into building material? Or, will they get you high?

@Gopherit: That makes sense...
Trap it in the crystal, heat the crystal, extract the CO2 and store it is some other method, then reuse crystal to trap more CO2....

@DocGratis: Yeah, but the CO2 that gets absorbed by plants gets together with water and light to be converted to sugars and O2. This is trapping CO2 in what's yet to be proved to be a stable matrix. It's kinda silly that this is being marketed as a way of helping greenhouse emissions, but I guess that's how scientists get their funding.....by lying their asses off.

Oh, and this all reminds me a little of Dubya's recent zero-emission power plant boondoggle.

@Gopherit: Perhaps once stored the crystals could be put through another process that converts the CO2 they store into a high-number carbon-based molecule that could be used as a fuel. And I bet that the scientist did not actually market it as way to reduce greenhouse emissions but whoever wrote the article did. Scientist are often very conservative with the claims of their research its the lay public and journalist that hype the results or dangers through lack of understanding.

@bioball: I know plenty of scientists, and the squeaky wheels tend to get the federal grease. The peer-reviewed paper mentions nothing beyond the capabilities of the ZIF, but in the original Wired article, the PI makes it pretty clear:

"We're altering the environment irreversibly and something needs to be done or we might not have time to do anything about it," said Omar Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at UCLA, lead author of the paper. "If you can capture carbon dioxide that goes a long way towards a cleaner environment."

@Seth L: I worry more about the gravity being magnified, and living my last few moments as the first human puddle.

@DocGratis: Uhh, I'm just going by the article where they call them "nanoscale" and they are a form of "technology." They don't exactly occur naturally.

Plus, I was trying to be "science fictiony" on a blog about sci-fi things.

And the carbon footprint of the production process for each crystal is only what, 30 - 100 times the amount of carbon the crystals can be expected to absorb?

This is actually cool stuff, (See Bioball, I'm not sure carbon sequestration is the intent here either) it seems that the crystals can be manufactured to only capture a wide variety of single elements. Just what you will need for your replicator's elemental hopper.

PS. Why do people automatically assume self-replicating devices when they hear the word nanotechnology? No one ever assumes a couch will build another couch when it's metric properties are being discussed.

See? This is what happens when the marketroids appropriate the word "nanotechnology" to refer to everything *except* the original molecular manufacturing concepts of Drexler--which are currently still in some disrepute.

And supposedly informed people *still* don't understand that grey goo would have to be intentionally designed as a weapon.

The odds of grey goo occurring naturally or spontaneously are exceedingly remote. The closest natural analog to the grey goo scenario would be nearly 5 billion years ago when cyanobacteria converted our reducing atmosphere to the nitrogen oxygen mix we have today, killing of unknown numbers of anerobic organisms in the process.

Anyway, if these storage crystals got dumped out in the wild, I think it would be no worse than any other toxic waste disaster. It wouldn't be a civilization-ender.

They should mount all that hardware on the back of every 757 so that as they streak across the sky they can spread CO2 munching goodness.

I think Nano-Crystals is a pretty cool guy, eh eats carbon and doesn't afraid of anything.