[dba-Tech] Pick a bale of cotton

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Sat Dec 31 07:39:09 CST 2011


This from slashdot...

*"Altering the very fabric of technophilic society, a multinational team of
material scientists have created electric circuits and transistors out of
cotton fibers<http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/110911-electric-circuits-and-transistors-made-from-cotton>
 (abstract<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566119911003065>).
Two kinds of transistor were created: a field-effect transistor (FET), much
like the transistors found in your computer's CPU; and an electrochemical
transistor, which is similar but capable of switching at lower voltages,
and thus better suited for wearable computers. Cotton itself is an
insulator, but by using various coatings, the team from Italy, France, and
the United States was able to make conductor and semiconductor cotton
'wires' that retained most of their flexibility. The immediate use-cases
are clothes with built-in sensors (think radiation or heartbeat monitors),
but ultimately, think of how many thousands of interconnections are in
every piece of cotton clothing — you could make a fairly powerful computer!"
*

-- 
Arthur
Cell: 647.710.1314

Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it's the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
   -- from the Daodejing


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