Nanotechnology So Good You Can Eat It

March 18, 2014

(The Guardian) – In the last few years, the idea of electronics that can be literally eaten – or at least can safely dissolve in the body or in the environment – has unexpectedly evaded the science fiction realm, mostly thanks to advances in nanotechnology. In 2010, a group led by Siegfried Bauer – a physicist at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Germany – built a prototype of a transistor fully made of edible materials. “Polymers were made from corn, dielectric materials from sugar-like substances, semiconductors from carrot components and electrodes from thin layers of gold – that have an E number in Europe, that is, they can be taken in as food,” says Bauer.