Nanoscale Optical Fiber From Spider Silk 27
Makarand writes "Engineers may soon be able to
make the finest optical fibers with some help
from spiders. To make optical fibers narrower for nanoscale applications, researchers
coated spider silk fibers with glassy material which was later removed by baking. The spider Stegodyphus pacificus, a native of the Middle East and South Asia,
spins the thinnest known silk which promises to yield optical fibers
with a diameter of around two nanometres!"
Re:Punny (Score:4, Funny)
Sticky situation (Score:1)
It's about time... (Score:4, Funny)
The silk is removed, not the glassy coating (Score:5, Interesting)
The post made it sound like the glassy coating was being removed.
The light then travels in the air filled core, not in the glass.
The use in scanning near-field microscopes is interesting, but don't we already have versions of those that use nono-sized particles that emit light (fluoresce), instead of the types that use fiber optics as the light source?
Exploitation? (Score:3, Funny)
Does this mean the vegans will boycott silk fiber-optic communications?
Hollow tubes (Score:5, Informative)
Most optical fibres for communications are solid, that is they work by total internal reflection, where the light bounces off the outer wall of the cylinder (in modern fibres this isn't quite the case, they put different refractive indexes of glass around the outside to 'bend' the light but that's splitting hairs).
The hollow tubes in the article are weird beasts, allowing rather strange things to happen with less than full wavelengths of light -- they're not usually used for communications.
The samples that they made here are only about a centimetre long as well, and I don't think you could make really long tubes because you have to get the baked spider silk out of the tube when you're done! Imagine trying that with a 1 km-long length!
Re:Grr... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Oh hang on, are you complaining that you're not used to the standard way of spelling 'metre' (ie. you think it should be spelled 'meter' which to everyone else means a little dial that displays some information) or are you not used to the standard metric system itself?
OK, here goes:
NOTE FOR ALL USA CITIZENS: Replace all instances of the word "nanometre" with "1/25188917" inches. There! Much easier to read!
Friggin for
Re:Grr... (Score:4, Funny)
OR 0,00000000004 olympic sized swimming pools!
Have these fibres been tested? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Have these fibres been tested? (Score:1)
Re:Have these fibres been tested? (Score:1)
use in CPUs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:use in CPUs? (Score:2)
Re:use in CPUs? (Score:2)
Re:use in CPUs? (Score:2)
However, I understand there are applications for this in chip to chip communications.
Re:use in CPUs? (Score:2)
why not... (Score:2)
Diameter discrepency (Score:4, Insightful)
You are all missing the point! (Score:2)
It all makes sense now!!!
This war isn't about liberty, or oil! Its about SPIDERS!