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Making Biodegradable Computer Chips Out of Spider Silk

Posted by samzenpus on from the weave-and-play dept.

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.

8 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Self consistency optional. by Kincaidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Self consistency optional. by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Funny

      Oh, I don't know. In lots of industries "within four orders of magnitude" is the same thing as "equal". Economists and US senators, for example.

    2. Re:Self consistency optional. by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why do you hate America? If we paid CEOs even more money, they'd create even more jobs.

    3. Re:Self consistency optional. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

      The phrase "correlation does not imply causation" is usually a fairly good indicator that the person who said it doesn't understand correlation OR causation. In your case it doesn't even start to make sense.

      If light travels through spider silk with four orders of magnitude more loss than through glass then light travels through spider silk 10,000 times more poorly than through glass fibre. That is, it doesn't travel through silk nearly as easily as through glass. Nobody said anything about data loss.

  2. Hype masquerading as news by concealment · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  3. Chips made of spider silk? by Anne_Nonymous · · Score: 2

    They're gonna find a few bugs in these.

  4. Re:Weren't they unable to mass produce spider silk by ravenlord_hun · · Score: 2

    Wait until they unionize...

  5. The fine print... by XiaoMing · · Score: 2

    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.