Developments will affect every industry. It's all in how you bend the nanotube. Just as hoedown musicians bend their musical saws different ways to get different notes, chemists can now control chemical reactions by bending single-walled carbon nanotubes different ways.
Simulations suggest that conformational strain change the chemical reactivity of the tubes.
You can significantly enhance their local reactivity by controlling the deformation. This publication means that more experimentalist in industry, academia and government laboratories will be exposed to the above work and may want to utilize the proposed concepts for new sensors, electronics and materials applications. Previous proposals for acquiring these materials have required large mining facilities on the Moon or on large asteroids. These proposed facilities are large, complex, and difficult or impossible to automate using near-term technology. Because AsterAnts does not mine large objects, but rather captures small objects, automation is practical.