Slashdot Mirror
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."
...they're putting them into condoms to build up a database for "virtual sex"?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
"Wiring like this could be woven into stretchy sports clothing and used to connect up sensors that monitor athletic performance."
With the tight restriction on performance enhancing drugs in the Olympics and now mainstream sports, how will this possibly be allowed?
And even if it was legalized, how much stretching can the body take before succumbing to injury?
I wonder if this could help patients with I.C. It's rather painful and if the "new nerves" can be made to ignore certain impulses...that'd be very beneficial. Very intriguing, anyway
Excersize control: imagine your DVD playing the workout tape, and a machine monitoring your muscles as you work out. The DVD says "You need to work harder on your abs, the muscles aren't working hard enough". THAT would be cool. I know I could use it.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Now you can finally make a data port that connects directly to a person. You can theoretically send and receive neural signals which can interact and control a machine...or perhaps the other way around. If you think I full of crap, check out this link. Join the Army and you too can be a cyborg!
As another example of the article being poorly put together: The article states "The usual way to make stretchable conductors is to embed metal particles in a rubbery polymer. But the particles tend to separate when the material is stretched, causing the electrical conductivity to plummet."
But the research in the end use a polymer which I assume would have to be rubbery in order to strech with the spring.
" Instead of fashioning the gold wires into helical springs, however, they gave them a flat, oscillating shape, like a meandering river, since this is easier to make. They manufactured them by electroplating gold onto a sheet of silver, surrounding the wires with polymer and then stripping the silver away."
Admittedly metal particles and metal wires are slightly different but a wire is simply a structure made up of particles.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Most devices/machines today depend heavily on a motors/engines/circuits that are not usually flexible and need to maintain a rigid structure. Sure, we try to cover/encapsulate these devices in a pleasing exterior (car bodies, plastic casings etc) in order to protect the hardware and us from the dangerous interiors.
Imagine cars made up of soft cushiony/rubbery material, which bounces back to absorb a collision...the metal body can dent in and absorb the force of the impact, but it works only against collisions against other cars/hard objects -- not against collisions with humans/animals and other "soft" substances.
Ofcourse, we could have a soft covering for cars, made of a cushiony substance, but the problem has been embedding circuits/machinery in the soft exteriors, because they tend to bend and damage the interiors.
Nature has found the perfect way to create organs/pumps/filters/wires which are made out of soft tissue, and is malleable enough to survive severe tension/distortion and bending.
Here's to hoping that one day we will be able to create soft fuzzy machines which won't be so hard on our water-bag bodies.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This might be the breakthrough the BION folks could use to advance their research.
I'm feeling like I could be the 6 trillion dollar man any year now... between this, powered exoskeletal legs, BrainGate computer hacker upgrades, and health-enhancing contact lenses, I'll be a super sapper in no time. I wonder how much of this my beloved US Army has actually looked into.
are they going to coat them in extensible insulator, too?
and every crush-injury will destroy them
these guys need ome more requirements analysis
Hmm, I could see this as a BIG thing for social studies, however. Sure, from a required standpoint it's horrible, but it'd never fly. From a science standpoint.
I'd love to see experiments done where volunteers wear clothing (shoes, hats, socks, pants, underwear, shirts) with this type of thing embedded to collect data. This could be SO useful...
* Wear and tear points in clothing. Wear do different clothing styles rub against someone, potentially uncomfortably, depending on the body shape and size.
* hot/cold comfort... Where does the wearer get hotter, colder based on wear of certain overcoats, garments and standard clothing
* posture studies... how do people really sit, stand, skip and run? once again, by body shape, age, race, culture, locale
* interaction studies... check for nervousness and pulse rate and the like based on social interaction. This could be done with wires and straps and such, but those things also impose tehmselves on wearers. THis could be done "on the sly" like the driving studies about how much people pay attention, when they THINK it's about seeing how they react to traffic and road conditions. (can't find a link... if someone knows of one, post it... interesting read).
I'm sure there are many other ideas out there for such things in the study of human nature. This is a tpoic that gets overlooked far too often.
Sounds related to "Muscle Wire" special wires used in a field of robotics called "BEAM" to cause movement without motors. Basically they are wires made of different metals fused together so that they react to electrical charge by contracting. Some really cool insect bots made from them can be found here: http://www.solarbotics.net/bestiary/2502_walker_2m ot_gal.html
Muscle Wire: Muscle Wires are thin, highly processed strands of a nickel-titanium alloy called Nitinol - a type of Shape Memory Alloy that can assume radically different forms or "phases" at distinct temperatures.
However, when conducting an electric current, the wire heats and changes to a much harder form that returns to the "unstretched" shape - the wire shortens in length with a usable amount of force.
.-=Wit is educated insolence=-. -Aristotle
Guess flexible wiring is more pleasant to be strapped into than a squid or a cuttlefish, though I doubt it'd be as fast. Cephalopods have very fast nervous systems, they're lightning quick partly as a result.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The expected lifetime of these wires will be heavily dependent upon the total strain they encounter in the duty cycle. Basically, it depends upon whether the deformation of the gold is in the elastic or plastic portion of the deformation curve.
Small deformations just cause the atoms in the gold (or any other material) to get closer or further apart. This is elastic deformation and can be done about infinity + 1 times before the metal breaks. eg: you can slightly flex a paper clip until doomsday and it is largely unaffected.
Larger deformations actually cause the atoms to start moving around, changing places in the atomic lattice structure to accomodate the strain. This is primarily accomplished by the movement of defects and dislocations through the material. This is plastic deformation and each plastic deformation lowers the lifetime of the material. eg: if you take a paper clip and start seriously bending it, in a few cycles, the part you're bending breaks off.
I have no idea what the threshhold is between plastic and elastic deformation in these wires is but it should be possible to design devices where the flex wires are in the elastic deformation regime most of the time. Eg: a smart shirt would have flex wires designed to be in the elastic regime when you're skipping around, swinging your arms, whistling show tunes. However, when you trip over a comatose mime and fall into an open storm serwer, the wires would be plastically deformed but won't break like conventional electrodes would in the same situation. Thus giving us essential data to force passage of the mime prevention act of 2008.
Just imagine having some MEMS-built array implanted in your eye, which could be turned on and off with a remote, that would let your eyes pick up infrared? It would only work well at night because otherwise it would probably be too much of a signal for your nerves to adequately cope with, although I guess you could probably adapt to that to some degree. Or better yet, nanobuilt (Anyone not see that coming? Sorry.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The last thing I want geeks designing is my clothes. I'm not fond of the short-sleeve-polo-with-company-logo, okay!
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.