Growing Wires In Water

moooooooo writes: "Australia's ABC is reporting that U.S. researchers have discovered a new way to grow microscopic electrical wires in water, and soon hope to be plugging into living cells. Kevin D. Hermanson and colleagues from the University of Delaware created self-assembling, self- repairing conductive wires -- a micrometre in diameter and 5 mm in length -- by suspending gold particles in water between two electrodes."

Comments

is "fuzzyness" a problem

[tony_gardner]

Looking at the pictures, I notice that a lot of the wires look very fuzzy. I'd think that these would bleed signal like crazy and be an impedence nightmare for non-DC signals. Still pretty impressive though.

An interesting point relating the article to the press release here:

http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/01-02/microwire110 20 1.html

In the article, it's all about bio-interfacing and what an advance this is. The press release says:

"One very interesting, albeit yet remote, possibility is to use these wires for electronic-biology interfacing," Velev said.

Not quite the same thing.

In addition, in the article, it broadly quotes a Professor Gerard Milburn. I find this quite interesting, in an article on biology and chemistry. He was my old Head of Department. He's a theoretical quantum physicist working in quantum measurement and quantum computing. Not my expert of choice in this field.