Uploaded May 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Cambridge engineers have taken inspiration from spider silk to develop a method to make adaptive and eco-friendly sensors that can be directly and imperceptibly printed onto a wide range of biological surfaces, whether that’s a human finger or a flower petal: eng.cam.ac.uk/news/imperceptible-sensors-made-electronic-spider-silk-can-be-printed-directly-human-skin
Spider silk can conform and stick to a range of surfaces. These ‘spider silks’ also incorporate #bioelectronics, so that different sensing capabilities can be added to the ‘web’.
The fibres, at least 50 times smaller than a human hair, are so lightweight that the researchers printed them directly onto the fluffy seedhead of a dandelion without collapsing its structure.
This low-waste and low-emission method for augmenting living structures could be used in a range of fields, from #healthcare and #VirtualReality, to electronic textiles and environmental monitoring.
Reference:
Wenyu Wang et al. ‘Imperceptible augmentation of living systems with organic bioelectronic fibres’ . Nature Electronics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-024-01174-4
Credit: Andy Wang, former postdoc at the Department of Engineering.
Cambridge engineers have taken inspiration from spider silk to develop a method to make adaptive and eco-friendly sensors that can be directly and imperceptibly printed onto a wide range of biological surfaces, whether that’s a human finger or a flower petal: eng.cam.ac.uk/news/imperceptible-sensors-made-electronic-spider-silk-can-be-printed-directly-human-skin
Spider silk can conform and stick to a range of surfaces. These ‘spider silks’ also incorporate #bioelectronics, so that different sensing capabilities can be added to the ‘web’.
The fibres, at least 50 times smaller than a human hair, are so lightweight that the researchers printed them directly onto the fluffy seedhead of a dandelion without collapsing its structure.
This low-waste and low-emission method for augmenting living structures could be used in a range of fields, from #healthcare and #VirtualReality, to electronic textiles and environmental monitoring.
Reference:
Wenyu Wang et al. ‘Imperceptible augmentation of living systems with organic bioelectronic fibres’ . Nature Electronics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-024-01174-4
Credit: Andy Wang, former postdoc at the Department of Engineering.
