Stretchy Wires to Create Artificial Nerves

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University have built electronic circuits which exhibit a rubbery behavior. The flexible circuits, built by using gold springs, can stretch like rubber. And Nature says that these stretchy wires can be used to create artificial nerves bending inside our bodies or wearable electronics. 'Wiring like this could be woven into stretchy sports clothing and used to connect up sensors that monitor athletic performance. Rubbery electrodes made from biocompatible materials might be attached to a beating heart and used to sense impending problems.' This overview contains more details and references about these flexible wires."

Comments

Re:Excellent idea

[musingmelpomene]

audio input? Perhaps you're thinking of the Audi-Oh! vibrator (vaguely NSFW).

Re:Um...

[ajlitt]

We've had them for many years. It's called NiTiNOL. Nitinol is a metal alloy that, when used in wires, constricts when current is passed through it (heating phase) and stretches when it is idle (cooling phase). This is also the same material that those bend-proof wire glasses frames are made of. See http://www.dynalloy.com/AboutNitinol.html for just one manufacturer's info page.

Re:Sounds like inferior cephalopod nerves to me

[SB9876]

Actually, cephalopod nerves aren't that amazing. They're no faster that than the nerves in your body. It's just that cephalopods never developed myelinated nerves. Myselin insulates the nerve and allows for much faster signal propogation. The large size of cephalopod nerves is simply an alternate way to get higher transmission speeds.

Either way, nerves only transmit at a few hundred miles an hour. Even assuming these flex wires aren't as conductive as a bulk gold wire, you're still looking at a transmission speed at a significant fraction of c.

Silicon and metal wiring operates at speeds millions of times higher than biological nervous systems.

Re:A step ahead

[drinkypoo]

Saying that nature has found the perfect way is both touching and incorrect. Nature has found evolution, which is something you can find simply because it's a sort of law (it would be amusing to discover tomorrow that we are all full of tiny intelligent subatomic life forms which are in the active process of redesigning us to fit their needs or something) and which requires extremely long time scales and dramatic climatic events to do any serious work. Intelligence allows us to carry out deliberate functional design. Much of our design work is simply mimicking what nature has done, but by putting things together in combinations that ma nature might never have found, but there is also that which is based on science, on learning the behaviors of matter and energy, and the reasons why they behave a certain way, and approaching a design, well, more or less intelligently.

You're quite right that we are wasteful of energy, however. A car is an excellent example because they are a ubiquitous example of wasting energy. A really highly efficient internal combustion engine is maybe 50% efficient, for very large diesels which are very well designed. A really efficient internal gasoline-powered combustion engine in a car might be 30% efficient. Then the driveline loses 10 to 30% more on top of that. Not to mention that except in the case of hybrid and electric vehicles, energy used to go up a hill is lost going up the hill, you don't get any of it back when you come down. (A really good electric motor/generator is around 85% efficient, though there is some loss at the road, and to heat.) Hell just having big grippy tires on your car means you're wasting power turning kinetic energy into heat through friction and compression, that's why having narrow tires with relatively high pressure is good for your gas mileage.

Now one of the ways in which we mimic nature these days is through the use of "genetic" algorithms, where the computer invents (psuedo)random values within a set of predefined limits, and then uses a fitness function (the hard part) to rank the design based on, well, whatever you write the fitness function to detect, say rigidity and deflection under certain forces, including the static acceleration of gravity, and the weight of specified masses, intersection with other objects, overall size and weight, and so on. That of course is for a physical object. You could grow anything this way, including software. Does it compile? Does it run? What does it do with these things? As you can guess, the more complicated the thing is, the more complicated the fitness functions get and thus it takes longer to test the item, and of course the longer it takes to generate new iterations, because somehow in all of this you will have to do an analysis of your data and determine which direction to go, what to keep, and what to discard. In other words, evolution is a hard thing to do in software. The world is complicated, I don't think that's news.

Anyhow, coming back around to the point, we tend to seize a thing and run with it until it doesn't work any more. Cars have been filling our needs ("our?" - "we" in this case is the set of people with disposable income) for some time and through the exploitation of some people and some natural resources we've been using them, and will continue to use them, until something else becomes cheaper, because we're living in a capitalistic society and that's the way things work. This is a time of opportunity for alternative transportation schemes because the value of automobiles is being reduced through the high petrol prices. The longer they stay up, the more TDI models VW is going to sell, the more Hybrids Toyota is going to sell (Toyota announced some time ago that they were going to offer everything as a hybrid before long) and generally the further we will get from the inefficient vehicles we have now - but they'll still be cars.

I'd love to have some legged running-machine like the landstriders in the dark crystal, made all out of composites and flexible surfaces, that cou