Physicists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Princeton, and Brandeis have demonstrated the formation of semipermeable vesicles from inorganic clay.Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet. That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.
It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. “Plants can’t run and hide,” says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. “If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.”
FLEXIBLE DISPLAYS:
-Advantages: Flexible plastic displays can be thinner, lighter and more durable than glass, which can lower manufacturing costs, increase product life and make new designs possible.
-Applications: First will likely be smart phones, tablets and notebook computers. It could eventually be used in clothing, wall displays and other products that can be curved or rolled.
-Challenges: Requires new manufacturing processes and transistor materials. Hewlett-Packard is working on a method for imprinting and etching spools of plastic film; others are working with sheets of plastic temporarily bonded to glass.
In the course of their research, the Tel Aviv University team also found that the yellow and brown stripes on the hornet abdomen enable a photo-voltaic effect: the brown and yellow stripes on the hornet abdomen can absorb solar radiation, and the yellow pigment transforms that into electric power.
Lenses that monitor eye health are on the way, and in-eye 3D image displays are being developed too – welcome to the world of augmented vision
