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Microbes That Produce Miniature Electrical Wires
anukit writes "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered a tiny biological structure that is highly electrically conductive. This breakthrough helps describe how microorganisms can clean up groundwater and produce electricity from renewable resources. It may also have applications in the emerging field of nanotechnology, which develops advanced materials and devices in extremely small dimensions."
Wow. It would be like the Hitchhiker's Guide where nothing is ever manufactured because the universe is so vast than anything you could possibly imagine probably grows somewhere.
A similar process was developed for removing radioactive waste from water. A type of bacteria acts like a room ionizer and removes the particles boyance. The radioactive material settles to the bottom of the tank and allowing it to be safely collected.
Another possible option could be in removing heavy metals from the water not only for toxic polution reasons but to harvest metals. The best way to get industry to clean up after themselves is to give them a way to make it profitable. They don't want to throw away sellable metals but they aren't usually profitable to extract. Bacteria that leaves a metalic residue whether from excreting it or from the dead bacteria itself would be a cheap way of extracting the metals from waste water.
If the idea is the build in interface to neurons in the brain, why would you need to grow something organic? Chip implants that extend inorganic electrodes into the brain are already a reality, and they seem to work fine for research (I'm too lazy to look up the reference on that quadripelegic dude who got one, recently).
Referring the that story, I recall that there were two big practical problems with the chip implant: 1) you have to drill a hole in the skull in order to make contact, and 2) the electrodes extending from the chip to the brain are too gross of a bridge to get a good signal sampling.
So something like building ultra-tiny conductors on demand in particular spots would be incredibly helpful in making the existing brain interface more practical, because it could be less invasive and produce much finer connections. Sounds like a hell of an application to me.
This development is all sorts of interesting, but for this particular application? I'm just not seeing the basis for enthusiasm.
The nanowires are incredibly fine, only 3-5 nanometers in width (20,000 times finer than a human hair), but quite durable and more than a thousand times long as they are wide.
In other words, the length of these wires is 20 times finer than a human hair. They sure do work to make these numbers sound exciting!