Slashdot Mirror
Making Biodegradable Computer Chips Out of Spider Silk
An anonymous reader writes in a story about a neat potential use for spider silk. "Many people have heard that spider silk is a sort of supermaterial: stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar, and yet incredibly malleable and flexible. But the silk has other properties that make it ideal for use in electronic devices. Light can travel through a silk strand as easily as it does through a fiber optic cable.
'When we first tested spider silk, we didn’t know what to expect,' said physicist Nolwenn Huby of the Institut de Physique de Rennes in France. 'We thought, "Why not try this as an optical fiber to propagate light?'" Huby and her team were able to transmit laser light down a short strand of the silk on an integrated circuit chip. The silk worked much like glass fiber optic cables, meaning it could carry information for electronic devices, though it had about four orders of magnitude more loss than the glass. Huby said that with a coating and further development, the silk could one day have better transmission capabilities. She will present her results at this year’s Frontiers in Optics conference, Oct. 14 to 18 in Rochester, New York.
"Light can travel through a silk strand as easily as it does through a fiber optic cable. ..... it had about four orders of magnitude more loss than the glass."
It couldn't even be self-consistent in the SUMMARY? *sigh*
Someone's going to have a bad case of the Mondays.
It's a neat thought-experiment, but like many things that get touted in the media, more hype than reality.
This won't be easily manufactured on a large scale. It will not be as fast as fiber optics or electricity. It will degrade during use.
Fix those, then let us know...
"Light can travel through a silk strand as easily as it does through a fiber optic cable.. ..the silk worked much like glass fiber optic cables [...] though it had about four orders of magnitude more loss than the glass."
What the actual effin' Christ.
There I said it first!
They're gonna find a few bugs in these.
Queue the Dyson sphere networks..
I mean, a lot of industries would LOVE having spider silk in large quantities - it's a very durable material, and could be pretty useful in making bulletproof vests or strong-yet-light cables, if I recall correctly.
So even if it's theoretically correct - I kind of doubt it'll ever get better than glass, mind you - there'll be just another industry standing in line waiting for the artificial spider silk to start flowing...
Ideal for a small set of medically related electronic devices, it seems.
I don't think it's likely to replace glass for anything else.
Can you do it in the cloud?
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I'm picturing the poor spiders in massive dorms in China, being forced to spin silk 12-14 hours per day.
Wait until they unionize...
they've been doing that for regular silk for centuries.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Four orders of magnitude difference in attenuation... That's literally 10,000x.
In related news, I will be attending this same conference to deliver a talk regarding my findings that peanut butter can serve as windows, with similar differences in optical attenuation, with uncertainty of plus/minus spider silk.
when you can have silk - Buy are silk computers and help us defeat our terrorist adversaries, the spider people
Sincerely,
Brad Pitt
And yet after all those centuries, they are not using spiders. Tells you something about the practicality of using spiders as a source of silk.
They may be more 'biodegradable', but they certainly are not vegan.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Does one, seriously, need to spin everything in green brouhaha these days? Biodegradable fiber optic, yeah sure, as if it made the tiniest shred of difference. For one, semiconductor industry produces quite a bit of waste water and waste solvents, all laced with pretty nasty, toxic stuff. For another, the semiconductor material itself, even when doped, is pretty much fucking sand. It doesn't fucking have to be biodegradable, because it non-degrading is not a fucking issue at all. We don't fucking need sand to biodegrade, you retards. Sigh.
It'd be worthwhile if they could, for example, make biodegradable chip packaging, that would be a revolution since by volume and by mass there's a couple times more packaging (encapsulant) than semiconductor material. Or, say, biodegradable chip substrates.
One also has to understand the real and oft ignored costs of making things biodegradable. There was, once upon a time, a snafu with biodegradable wiring insulation in automotive wiring harnesses. Some hullaballoo must have figured that hey, stripping wires is "hard work" and with war on drugs raging on they might run out of drug addicts and/or alcoholics who'd do this to support their habits (or kids in third world regions, perhaps). So instead they made things even more wasteful as said harnesses started failing left right and center, and people spent way more energy than was saved by any biodegradability to troubleshoot the damn things and fix them. It's almost like the switch to lead-free soldering: yeah, sure it will reduce the leached lead in badly managed (acid-phase) landfills, but the amounts seen in practice are so small anyway that they are not a big concern as far as I understand it. What is a concern, though, is reduced yields and longevity of consumer electronics, and resultant waste of energy.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16554357
Genetically modified goats give spider webs instead of milk from their udders.
I'm not at all interested in having my computer biodegrade. I want it to last. Too much waste and throw away in our society. Things should be built to last. I have cast iron cookware that is over a hundred years old and will last for maybe another thousand years.
Then: Would future technicians need spiders in their toolboxes, in order to fix broken data links.
One fly a day for the spider, and a check to the tech.
I'm calling it Goblin Chips. The marketing battles among the skyscrapers of New York City will be EPIC!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Is slashdot ever up2date anymore? I read this last week on wired.....
Crawling the world wide web will make much more sense.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I pity the poor fool who has to milk the spiders for 12-14 hours per day.
http://www.trendsfair.com/computer-chips-can-take-use-of-spiders-silk/