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Black Silicon Slices and Dices Bacteria
Zothecula writes "Originally discovered by accident in the 1980s, black silicon is silicon with a surface that has been modified to feature nanoscale spike structures which give the material very low reflectivity. Researchers have now found that these spikes can also destroy a wide range of bacteria, potentially paving the way for a new generation of antibacterial surfaces."
Does this stuff have any sort of neat catalytic effects or other cleaning mechanisms, or are the structures so tiny that bacterial polysaccharide goop won't neutralize them inside a week?
Soap also serves as a pretty good soap. I suspect the fine size scale of these structures, on a rigid silicon backing, would't be too good at reaching into very much of the rugged mountainous topography (on a bacteria's scale) of human skin.
From the TFA:
" ... the wings of the cicada Psaltoda claripennis could shred certain types of rod-shaped bacteria ... "
... the wings of the Diplacodes bipunctata or Wandering Percher dragonfly were even more deadly, killing both rod-shaped and spherical bacteria ... "
"
I am very curious.
Since the structures on the WINGS of the insects, do they have some yet-to-be-discovered aero-dynamic functionality, apart from their ability to shred bacteria ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In short: no.
Essentially the problem with asbestos was the very high aspect ratio and (obviously) bio-incompatibility.
Black Silicon spikes don't have anywhere near this kind of aspect ratio and are comparatively biocompatible.
Source: doing a silicon surface science nanotechnology masters.
Except this only works on the bacteria on contact.
Get a bit of slime and the surface never touches most of the bacteria.
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Table-ized A.I.
Then, I'd suggest you research some methods to deal with the increase of temperature in your car, due to the absorbtion of light in the spectral range 350–1150 nm (near infrared to near UV) - you'll need to dissipate approx 1 kW for each square meter of absorbing surface
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Happily, I read down the thread this far instead of rushing out to get a few square meters of double sided tape and a half a million dragonfly wings... thanks for saving my time and I'm pretty sure all the dragonflies that won't have to walk home would also be appreciative.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I imagine that that's why those bugs are getting away with them. Nothing like being biological to get aggressive self-repair capabilities thrown in more or less for free... Pending nanites, no such luck on our end.
Marine anti-fouling coatings have similar trouble: they've tried to make less toxic ones, with specially crafted surface geometry that resists mooring by marine organisms; but the minute it starts to wear out, boom, stuff growing. Even the ones that are laced with ghastly organometallic biocides eventually leach enough to lose effectiveness and have to be stripped and re-applied.
(though, speaking of anti-fouling coatings, if microspike-structures are aerodynamic enough for insect wings and brutally biocidal, I suspect that the world's marine shipping industry would fight like dogs to give you their money if you could paint this stuff on...)
I wish the best of luck to whoever gets to model the behavior of a mixed (mostly) nonpolar gas interacting with a dense, more or less randomly packed, array of 240nm spikes, composed of some sort of complex biological polymer arrangement, at the boundary of the (already complex enough) interaction between an insect wing and the surrounding fluid.
Let us suppose a perfectly spherical spike in a vacuum...
Set your phasers on "funky"!