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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."
Interesting read...the first thing that came to my mind when I read this is that these organic wires may be just the thing for the interface between electronics and organic tisue. One of the major problems in cybernetics is that the chemistry of the implants tends to be poisonous to the surrounding tissue, while the chemistry of the surrounding tisue tends to be corrosive to the implant. Over time, the interface degrades and must eventually be replaced. Microbial nanowires may eliminate this problem and pave the way for permanent interfaces sooner than we thought.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I never really considered the idea that germs could eat food and use it to shit wires.
What if, through genetic engineering, we created neurones with these conductive pili?
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
More than any nano-tech application (computer nanotech, that is), such a microbe that can be engineered to clean up waste water and then settle to the bottom of a lake and quietly die would be excellent in cleaning up many of our polluted lakes and streams.
Obviously it would need to be non-toxic to existing wildlife and ideally it would be able to compress and become coal or oil for future generations, but the main goal would be to clean up our messes.
With small amounts of electrical wiring as byproducts of the "biological" process of the microbe, we may even be able to "harvest" our wiring needs in much the same way we harvest seaweed or shellfish today for consumption.
This is another amazing step in our God-granted dominion and stewardship of His Creation.
concrete about the pili themselves. It would be neet to know something about their molecular structure.
Another thing about this article that hit me: genetic engineering really is going strong. I still think of it in some ways as a future technology. But their description of turning of the genes that result in the pili as well as the idea of manipulating those genes to produce pili with various characteristics really points out a high degree of sophistication in genetic engineering techniques.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
First they offered to clean up our waste water.
Then they started making wires.
Then they started selling the wires to us.
Now we need to pay to take a crap.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Until they start calling us "ugly bags of water"
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
Storm
P.S. IANANTE (I am not a nano-tech engineer)
This has some potential for the computer industry in the way of getting us closer to Moore's Law but also paves the way for increasing the amount of malleable logic in what was previously fixed silicon applications.
Of course, nanowire is pretty expensive to produce. Or it used to be...
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
GeoBacter
Interesting stuff.
THINK! It's patriotic
"Bacterial biomineralization, as it's known among the experts, has been observed in other places and for other minerals. In fact, bacterial abilities to precipitate metals from solution have been used in some very high-tech contemporary methods of treating polluted water. It's even been appreciated that some bacteria can precipitate gold. Watterson himself had found that the spore coats of another bacterial breed serve as nuclei for luring gold out of solution in broths of gold chloride."
-cp-
While not explicitly linked to biomimicry, the implications relate to this relatively new field. There's now a web site dedicated to dissiminating the developing ideas. My introduction came from reading Biomimicry by Janine M. Benyus. I found a copy in the central library and I think most city libraries would have a copy. It's not a rigorous read and an easy one. As the fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology grow, implementations of biomimicry will provide avenues to harness nature according to it's own rules, or, so I hope. :)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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!
Personally, I would look to single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) for what you describe. The real problem we have is that the body has a nasty habit of rejecting anything that isn't made by our own body. I have a feeling that these organically made wires will be no mored loved then the old fashion kind. The issue isn't organic vs inorganic, it is whether or not the body identifies the wires as not being apart of itself. We have evolved for millions of years to whack bacteria that isn't our own, so I wouldn't but the chances high that our bodies will be terribly receptive (though I would be pleased to be wrong).
There have been some mixed signals as to weather or not nanotubes are carcinogens.
The latest studies show that SWCNTs to be non-toxic and easily dealt with by the body. It isn't a green light, but it is hopeful. The real magic behind nanotubes is two fold. First, they are really small. Cells are giants compared to nanotubes. Second, nanotubes can be functionalized relatively easily, which is to say you can attach things to the surface of the nanotubes. When people talk about using nanotubes, they rarely mean those nifty little carbon chains that we all know at love. Generally, functional nanotubes have something else on the surface to specialize its purpose. For biological purposes, this means that what you see isn't necessarily what you have to work with. If these bacteria made nanowires turn out to be rejected by the human body, you are out of luck and the work stops there. With SWCNTs though, it just means you need to alter what type of molecules are hanging off of the carbon chain until you find some that the body won't attack and that don't disrupt the properties of the nanotube too bad.
Simply put... single walled carbon nanotubes are the shit, err, and the future.
... wire my daughter's doll house for Ethernet.
Bush should have died, not Reagan -- Morrissey
Morrissey rides a cockhorse -- The Warlock Pinchers