Good news for green-minded geeks: biodegradable computer chips
made out of very strong yet flexible spider silk may be coming soon.
Researchers behind this new project are counting on the silk's properties that make it ideal for use in electronic devices, Wired.com reported.
“When we first tested spider silk, we didn’t know what to expect. We
thought, ‘Why not try this as an optical fiber to propagate light?’”
said physicist Nolwenn Huby of the Institut de Physique de Rennes in
France.
She was referring to the property of
spider silk that allows light to travel through a silk strand as easily
as through a fiber optic cable.
Huby will present her results at this year’s Frontiers in Optics conference, Oct. 14 to 18 in Rochester, New York.
Wired.com said Huby and her team transmitted laser light down a short strand of the silk on an integrated circuit chip.
"The silk worked much like glass fiber optic cables, meaning it could
carry information for electronic devices, though it had about four
orders of magnitude more loss than the glass," it said.
But Huby said a coating and further development can improve the silk's capability to transmit data.
On the other hand, Wired.com noted spiders may produce relatively fewer
quantities of silk as they "need lots of space, are often cannibalistic
of their neighbors" compared to silkworms.
Less e-waste
Wired.com said e-waste could be a thing of the past once this silk tech is developed.
"Whenever a new snazzy cellphone comes out, you could simply compost
your old model instead of leaving it to languish in a dump, slowly
leaching toxic chemicals. But such electronics are still decades away,"
said Biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto of Tufts University in
Somerville, Massachusetts.
But for now, he said
engineers would still need to figure out how to make biodegradable
batteries, interfaces, and everything else in modern-day electronics.
Medical applications
Once developed, this could also open the door to medical applications,
such as silk fibers carrying light to places in the body for internal
imaging.
"Because spider silk is incredibly thin
— roughly five microns in diameter or 10 times thinner than a human
hair – surgeons could perform diagnostic exams using very small openings
in the body," Wired.com said.
Omenetto also noted these materials are harmless, "so you can implant them.”
Omenetto has been working in this field for years and will give a talk
on opportunities for silk in high-tech products at Frontiers in Optics.
“The body has no reaction to them,” said Omenetto, who foresees silk
bandages in a patient embedded with electronic functions to monitor for
possible infections.
The patient need not worry
about having the monitoring device taken out again because the body will
simply absorb the biodegradabe material.
His
team has developed a small implantable radio frequency heater that could
sterilize an area against bacteria, Wired.com said.
Silkworm silk
Omenetto used silkworm silk, the kind used in fancy clothing and underwear that can be manufactured on an industrial scale.
Wired.com also noted silkworms can be grown close together and produce silk fibers.
Omenetto takes the silk from textiles and boils it in water to extract the silky proteins.
From this, his team produced a plastic that is 100 percent natural and fully biodegradable.
blue laser beam
Wired.com also said Omenetto’s team has created a device that can shoot a blue laser beam by doping materials with silk.
The gadget’s components are fully compostable and also use less power than equivalent acrylic laser shooters, it said. — TJD, GMA News
source: gmanetwork.com
