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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
Thrills for you and for her - with the optional audio input, you too cam throb to the music of lurrrve gods such as Barry White or Motorhead!
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
As soon as they said Rubbery Behavior, I am thinking of this ultra advanced underwear.
What a change since the medievil days when knights used to wear potato-sack-material like underwear.
"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?
Perhaps the bendy straw people should sue.
"The wires can stretch to over half their original length."
Is it me, or does this violate some law of grammar, physics, or both?
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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
Caption from Graphic:The wires can stretch to over half their original length.
Elsewhere, cars were noticed to speed up to over half their original speed! Proof readers were able to increase their accuracy to over half their original accuracy! I increased my IQ to over half it's original size!
[signature]
Science discovery: Springs are spring-like, also some metal conducts electricity. Quick someone grab a patent!
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
Seriously though, this sounds fine for integrating electronics into fabrics, but the "artificial nerve" idea conjures images on Christopher Reeve leaping up and tap dancing. This invention doesn't sound like it has any therapeutic uses that a normal wire doesn't. Perhaps users of vagus nerve stimulators or other devices requiring in vivo wiring could be a little more physically vigorous without worrying about things pulling or breaking... but I have my doubts about even that.
One kink and it's trash can city.
Sweet informative mod.
This might be the breakthrough the BION folks could use to advance their research.
Wow. Just what we needed. Yet another use for Gold. You know, it being so damn plentiful and all. I was just saying to myself, as I threw away another gold can of soda, "I sure how they find a use for this stuff, because if not, Gold doesn't oxidize or break down very easily, and it will burst our landfills if we don't start a recycling program!" Maybe all those out-of-work gold miners can finally feel useful again, and not be he butt of environmentalist hate.
Why don't they ever find a great new way to use garbage?
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.
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.
are they going to coat them in extensible insulator, too?
and every crush-injury will destroy them
these guys need ome more requirements analysis
How long till I have to upgrade/patch the OS on my underwear?
From the article:
"the researchers estimate that the wires should be able to withstand several thousand cycles of extension and contraction."
That's no where NEAR what would be needed for any of the applications they mention. For example, at 70 beats per minute your heart beats 100,800 times per day. Assuming each step a runner takes covers 3 feet (very approximate here), then a "cycle" (back to starting configuration) is 6 ft. That's 880 "cycles" per mile. A single 6 mile run is therefore over 5000 cycles.
Several thousand "cycles of extension and contraction" is not even close to enough for any real world app. Who wants to have that internal heart monitor replaced several times each day? How about that high-tech single use "smart" sweatshirt?
These will need to be in the 100's of thousands to millions of cycles for their lifespan before they have any real utility.
Life is short: void the warranty.
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.
It's the cord from a telephone handset.
Now why didn't they think of that decades ago?
Oh, wait, they did.
Nevermind.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's FLAT. So maybe they've reinvented ramen noodles?
Anyone else horrified by the thought of this? i mean the first thing i thought of was the jack to my headphones, how every pair maybe lasts 2 weeks before either channel starts going out, or gets huge static.
just happily walking down the street someday with your new artificial leg, and all of a sudden the "nerves" give out and you take a face dive.. or in the case of the static, you could have the physical equivalent to tourettes; standing in line at the bank when all of a sudden your arm goes and punches the guy in front of you in the back of the head, and then yourself in the face a few times.. gives a new meaning to frayed nerves..
most metals just dont last long with a large amount of torsion. (for lack of a better word)
The reason that you see gold being used for this kind of stuff is that it's easy to work with. If you try and electroplate copper, you've got to worry about various oxides forming and all sorts of other junk. This can be prevented through careful control of your electroplating conditions. However, in the sort of rapid prototyping conditions that these researchers are working in, it's much simpler to just use gold and not worry about it.
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.
"Boy, you've got some nerve!" "You like it? I just had it grafted in this morning"
or else that webserver would be screaming in pain right now.