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NOVEMBER 19, 2007
Edited by Adam Aston NEW MATERIALS A Plastic with Hues You Can Use Here's an invention that seems more like a mood ring than an industrial technology: It's a gelatinous material that can be formed to any shape—from a flat sheet to an autumn leaf—and responds to changes in temperature, pressure, moisture, or acidity by changing color. Developed by materials science professor Edwin Thomas and teammates at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it's made up of repeating, ultrathin layers of polystyrene and a patented polymer whose molecules change shape, from short and coiled to flat and long, as conditions shift. When the molecules extend and contract, they reflect different wavelengths of light, determining the hue. One use could be to identify food that's gone bad: "You want your potato chips to be dry and crisp," says Thomas. "So if a bit of gel in the packaging goes blue, you know moisture has crept in." WIRELESS WORLD Putting All Your Gizmos on the Same Wavelength Computers, mobile phones, and TVs all receive signals over radio waves, but they were never designed to share content with one another. So even in college dormitories with blazing broadband speeds and plenty of digitally skilled undergrads, there are some things the kids can't do. A student can't, for example, sit on a sofa in the common room, whip out an iPhone, and use it to browse a stash of photos on a personal computer in his friend's dorm room—much less drag and drop those over to the big TV so everyone can look at them. A Syracuse (N.Y.) startup called Wireless Grids hopes to make this kind of sharing easy, with the help of new, paradigm-bending software. Once you load it onto a laptop or cell phone, that device becomes a node on the "Grid"—a network of networks in your building, town, or any community. The content stored on it is available to all other nodes, whether they run on digital TV, cellular, or Wi-Fi frequencies. This raises obvious privacy concerns, so Wireless Grids built in safeguards. Users can wall off material they doesn't want others to see. The Grid will soon be tested in—where else?—a college dorm at Syracuse University, which developed the technology along with five other schools. Chipmaker Intel (INTC ) is considering collaborating with Wireless Grids, while Telecom New Zealand is evaluating the technology for use in homes. By Jennifer L. Schenker   RECYCLING For Sale: Slightly Irregular Silicon Computer chips are found today in everything from car engines to toys and greeting cards. They are cut, thousands at a time, from razor-thin, plate-sized disks of pure silicon. Yet quality standards are so exacting that even tiny missteps in manufacturing mean the whole wafer may have to be discarded. Now, that's no longer necessary. IBM (IBM ) has devised a method that grinds away the topmost layer of electronic circuits from defective wafers. Once resurfaced, the disks can be used again to test equipment in the chip factory. (Today, perfectly good "virgin" wafers are wasted in such routine tests.) In a final, extra twist, the recycled test wafers can be polished and sold to makers of solar cells. In the solar power market, high demand and tight supplies of silicon have driven up prices. Eric White, a technical leader who co-developed the process at IBM's Burlington (Vt.) factory, says this trick could help chipmakers avoid wasting 3 million wafers a year. At $40 to $150 per wafer, that adds up to hundreds of millions in savings.
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