Friday, July 16th, 2010

Future Fibers

Functional Fibers. Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT/Greg Hren Photograph.

Today, fibers are dumb strands of material. But could those fibers have more functions than just keeping the wearer warm and dry? Writing in the August issue of the journal Nature Materials, researchers describe fibers that can detect and produce sound -- acting as a microphone or a speaker.

Just over a year ago, some of the same researchers described engineering optoelectronic fibers capable of detecting the direction and wavelength of incident light. The team then used those fibers to build an assembly of those fibers that could detect images without the use of a lens. Where is the field of functional fibers headed? We'll talk about it.

Guests

Yoel Fink
Associate Professor of Materials Science
Principal Investigator, Research Laboratory of Electronics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts