While in Hong Kong on a business trip recently, Oliver Goh was on his laptop playing around in a virtual world, when he realized he’d left the water running in his home back in Switzerland. He noticed this because the virtual world contained a recreation of his Swiss residence that pulled information about the home’s energy and water consumption in real time. The gauge that measures water use was blinking. No problem: After his avatar hit the right button, the real-world water valve in Switzerland turned off.

That’s one of the applications of the OpenShaspa Home Energy Kit, available starting tomorrow from the startup that Goh co-founded, also called Shaspa. Created with open-source components like Arduino circuit boards, the kit comes with a system that can monitor and control home power output with wireless sensors, and connect this data to mobile phone and Internet applications. (After reading Katie’s story on another open-source energy tool, ACme, Goh says he plans to add an OpenShaspa device driver that supports it.) Sensors for gas, water and other utility resources can be integrated into the control system, as well.

Other energy management systems can be controlled via cell phones or the web, but in what could be a first, OpenShaspa can be hooked up to a virtual world created with OpenSimulator, an open-source spinoff of Second Life, to a simulated recreation of your home. Not just a cool widget for MMO geeks, Shaspa’s developers believe that modeling energy consumption data in 3D could make it more comprehensible and easier to manage. (It could even be used for a “World of Greencraft”-type game envisioned by a Stanford professor.) And Goh noted an additional benefit of running OpenShaspa from a virtual world: You can ask an avatar friend to look after your real-world house while you’re gone.

The kit includes a “Social Energy Meter,” which as the name suggests, makes all this energy consumption data publicly available online, where it can be collectively analyzed, tracked and compared on Twitter, Facebook, Google and other systems. Shaspa also has plans for a corporate version. Goh tells me 17 residential homes in the UK will launch an OpenShaspa pilot program this June.

Image courtesy of Shaspa.

Of course, it also didn’t help that, just last Tuesday, MTI received a letter from Nasdaq warning of an impending and involuntary delisting. So MTI is quitting Nasdaq just in time to avoid getting kicked off (the company said it was thinking of delisting even before Nasdaq’s warning).

Nasdaq pretty much bends over backwards to make it easy for companies to stay on the exchange. Once a stock is listed, it needs to meet at least one of three criteria: Net income from continuing operations of $500,000 in the last fiscal year, $35 million in market value of listed shares, or $2.5 million in stockholders’ equity. MTI had a net loss of at least $9.6 million for the past three years, a recent market cap below $5 million and, as of December 2008, $1.5 million in stockholder’s equity.

It gets worse. In MTI’s annual report to investors last week, PriceWaterhouseCoopers expressed concern about the company’s ability to continue to operate as a going concern.

The catalyst driving these unhappy events is MTI Micro, a subsidiary making methanol fuel cells as an alternative to lithium-ion batteries in portable devices. The biodegradable fuel cells used a proprietary technology called Mobion; the company intended to start selling Mobion products this year. In 2007, executives were confident about getting its fuel cells to market. Just last fall, the company was busy making them at once smaller and more powerful.

But the cost of developing and commercializing the fuel cells was crippling. At the end of 2008, MTI Micro helped build up a deficit of $118 million and left the company with $252,000 in working capital. As MTI said in its annual report:

“Because of these losses, limited current cash, cash equivalents and securities available for sale, negative cash flows and accumulated deficit, the report of the Company’s independent registered public accounting firm for the year ended December 31, 2008 expressed substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

That’s after MTI raised $1 million by selling 1.1 million shares of Plug Power last year and raised $2 million by issuing convertible notes to a board member and others. But without more funding from the government or private investors, MTI said it “does not expect to continue to fund MTI Micro’s portable power source business.” MTI’s other operations can make it through December with the cash on hand, but MTI Micro looks to have enough to keep operating into this month.

MTI said its stock is likely to continue trading on the over-the-counter or the pink sheets markets.

The angel fund is a for-profit venture that the Clean Energy Fund, a nonprofit founded with $30 million from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company bankruptcy, launched last April. Susan Preston, the angel fund’s general manager, said the fund raising is taking longer than expected because of the recession. “We’re working very hard at it, but it’s a struggle right now, no question about it,” she said. “We’re talking to lots of people all over the place, and everyone is saying, ‘We’re sorry, we agree with what you’re doing, but we just don’t have money right now.’”

The dramatic economic downturn has been such a shock that investors have become “like deer in the headlights,” Preston says. “You know you should move, but just can’t see how — that’s the best analogy I can think of for how people are feeling right now. If we can get them to move away from the headlights,” there will be a much more prosperous time ahead, she said.

Preston argues that early-stage startups are a good investment in the downturn because of their countercyclical nature. In other words, because companies are a few years away from an IPO or an acquisition, they could be well-poised to take advantage of an economic recovery down the road. “When you have a very early-stage company, you can have greater flexibility about when you decide to pull the trigger on a liquidity event,” she says, adding that startups are a good deal right now. “We can take advantage of valuations … and continue to organically grow these companies until we’re ready and the market’s ready for them.”

She thinks a time of cleantech acquisitions — read “exits” — is coming. “As cleantech becomes an increasingly important part of the economy, many companies will be looking for ways to expand in the market, and one very easy way for them to do that is through acquisition,” she says. “I actually think it’s a great time to be having investment activities. But it’s tough getting people to see that right now.”

The fund is looking at energy-efficiency technologies, such as lighting and energy-management software and components, she said. It also is considering technologies that could take advantage of anticipated new policies, such as technologies that calculate companies’ carbon footprints, which could work with a carbon cap-and-trade program. The fund in October announced investments in efficient-lighting startup HID Labs, biofuels company Allopartis Biotechnologies and an undisclosed solar company.

Called the MESSAGE project — for Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments — the research is led by the Imperial College London. The government’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which organized the conference and is partially backing the sensor research, said the network is the first of its kind in the world.

Set up in Gateshead, in northeast England, the pilot sensor network collects data on carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and other pollutants, as well as temperature, humidity and noise levels, and keeps a count of passing vehicles. The info is all sent back to a central computer, which can power an updated, online pollution map of the area.

The researchers are aiming to demonstrate the potential of a small, low-cost system that can be used for planning, management, and control of the environmental impacts of transport. It looks like it’s still in the research stage, so it’s unclear what the plans are, if any, for commercialization of the project.

The Gateshead network has around 50 wireless sensors attached to railings and streetlights along major roads in the area. A team from Newcastle University designed the Gateshead system using ZigBee-based sensors. The group, which also includes the University of Cambridge, plans to set up more sensors in Cambridge, Leicester, and London, with all of the networks beaming their data back to a common central server. The Cambridge researchers are looking at using cell phones to support a sensor network, while the Imperial College plans to build a system using Wi-Fi and WiMAX for communications and positioning.

The systems could be a boon to cities trying to keep a lid on traffic buildups, and allow drivers, or even pedestrians who are keeping an eye on the real-time data on their iPhone, to change their route to avoid the extra pollution. “Other cities in the UK and around the world, such as New York and New Delhi, are interested in replicating what we’re doing here,” said Professor Phil Blythe of Newcastle University in a statement.

Called “Eleanor,” the solar car has a cruising speed of 55 miles per hour — on a sunny day. Even if it’s cloudy, the team said that on a full charge the car’s batteries can hold enough power to drive from Boston to New York without needing any sunlight. That’s more than 200 miles on solar power.

There should be plenty of sunlight where they’re going — the car is set to compete in the World Solar Challenge race across Australia in October. This will be the 10th World Solar Challenge race, which draws teams from around the world for a 1,864 journey from Darwin in the Northern Territory to Adelaide in South Australia. The MIT team grabbed third place in the 2003 race, averaging 56 miles per hour with its last car, the “Tesseract.”

The new car (and the team behind it) will already be road-tested by the time it gets Down Under — the team plans to drive Eleanor across the U.S. this summer in preparation for the Australia race. And even though there’s only room for one in the car, the driver won’t be completely alone. The car, which is powered by about 20 square feet of monocrystalline silicon solar cells, is equipped with wireless monitors so the team’s lead and chase vehicles can keep an eye on the car’s performance in real time.

The driver also gets to sit up this time around. Previous solar cars have been almost flat, to cut down on drag. But that meant that drivers had to lay down when they were in the vehicle. New race regulations are bringing the solar cars closer to regular cars, requiring the driver to sit upright, with the seat back less than 27 degrees from vertical.

The system uses a piezoelectric-based nanogenerator where the stretching of a nanowire creates electricity. Zhong Wang, a materials science and engineering professor who led the research, told the Technology Review that this is the first time a generator has been shown to get energy from small, irregular motion — irregular in terms of frequency of motion as well as amplitude of power. This opens the door for possible uses in implantable medical devices that get their power from muscle stretches, heartbeats and bloodflow.

Putting energy harvesting nanodevices into bodies may be a few years away, but there are some energy harvesting systems that are already on the market, or at least much closer to market, including wireless sensors, regenerative braking, and even bumps in the road. And it’s not just startups that are getting in the game.

Chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor is working with McLaren Electronic Systems on a project that could give Formula 1 race cars a turbo boost from power collected through regenerative braking. EnOcean, a spinoff of electronics and industrial engineering giant Siemens, makes wireless modules for building automation systems that can grab energy from ambient sources including solar, heat and vibration.

And then there’s the charge-up-your-iPhone-while-you-walk application, with M2E Power developing an electromagnetic system to power up portable devices. There are even ways to get power from everyday, ambient radiation. Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory are working on getting power using nanoantennas that can absorb infrared energy.

Pretty soon, everything that moves, makes heat, or emits any kind of excess energy could be used to to power up tiny devices, or at least take some of the burden off primary power sources in home appliances or cars. Forget about putting a tiger in your tank — in the future, maybe you’ll stuff a few hamsters in there instead.

American Superconductor is going for a whopping 10 megawatts, more than twice the power of some of the bigger turbines in operation today. General Electric, one of the largest manufactures of wind turbines in the world, currently makes turbines ranging from 1.5 MW to 3.6 MW.

American Superconductor said this week that it will work with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and its National Wind Technology Center to look at the economics of building a 10-MW turbine. The Devens, Mass.-based company said it can get a bigger power punch but still keep the size and weight under control by using its high temperature superconductor wire, which it claims is lighter and more efficient than the copper wire traditionally used in wind turbines.

Apparently even the economic downturn can’t stop these new turbines from spinning. Carpinteria, Calif.-based Clipper Windpower, which recently announced production cuts and layoffs, insisted to the Guardian that its work with the UK’s Crown Estate on a 7.5-MW offshore turbine, dubbed the Britannia project, is going full steam ahead. Clipper announced plans for the more powerful turbine last April, calling it the world’s largest offshore turbine.

But what about the growing physical size of these giants? The National Wind Technology Center is looking at that as well, saying earlier this month that it plans to install two big turbines at its lab just south of Boulder, Colo. The turbines, from GE and Siemens, don’t necessarily represent the largest turbines available, but they’ll be the largest ever installed at the wind center, giving scientists a chance to poke and prod the machines to see what kind of stresses the turbines can take. They plan to work on ways to get more power out of existing turbines, and on how to improve the durability of the turbine’s components.

The GE turbine, a 1.5-MW model of which is currently available, will have a 262-foot steel tower, with the diameter of the rotor reaching 250 feet. The whole thing weighs about 220 tons. The Siemens turbine, a late-stage prototype, will generate 2.3 MW, with a tower about the same height as GE’s, but a much bigger rotor, one that covers 331 feet.

Maybe we’ll have a better idea of how big these giants can be, or should be, when the wind center finishes its tests in late 2011.

For each configuration of atoms, IBM Master Inventor Viktors Berstis told us on Friday, the program will calculate “what would happen if sunlight hit this thing,” and then enter information about the properties in a database. The goal is to find a configuration that turns a greater percentage of light into electricity than is possible with current plastic (also called polymer) solar technology. The distributed computing process could cut the time needed to run the planned calculations by about two decades, said Berstis, a senior software engineer and chief scientist for the World Community Grid.

Even at the cutting edge of solar research (we wrote about some coming out of UCLA last week), scientists today can achieve only a little more than 5 percent efficiency with plastic, compared with more than 10 percent efficiency with thin-film silicon. Researchers continue to pursue polymer solar cells, however, because of the potential for much cheaper and more flexible materials that could be used on more varied surfaces than today’s solar arrays.

The World Community Grid platform itself (which like SETI@home runs on UC Berkeley’s open-source BOINC software) is not new. Since 2004, IBM has put it to work on five projects, including a search for new anti-HIV drugs and an attempt to identify more nutritious strains of rice based on protein structures.

As with previous projects, Berstis said that, beyond commercial applications, IBM has philanthropic aims, and its findings will ultimately enter the public domain. He said a breakthrough in this research could help bring down the cost of solar significantly and change the economics of clean power.

But this project isn’t all about doing good. It also represents an opportunity for Big Blue to demonstrate its distributed-systems and cloud-computing services, since it plans to bolster volunteers’ computing power with an internal cloud and invite clients of related services to join the effort. “We’ll go through and try to synthesize all kinds of exotic materials,” he said. “It’s not guaranteed that we’ll find something — but there is a good chance we will.”

With smart grid tech, the power grid can more easily accommodate, say, a home with solar panels on its roof feeding unused energy back into the general power supply. If something like the Better Place infrastructure project in California, or for that matter, EDF’s own partnership with Renault in France, goes nationwide, all of those plug-ins could put a big strain on power supplies — unless a more “intelligent” grid allows cars to give and take juice from the grid according to when electricity is needed most.

IBM is hardly a new entrant in this field. It is a member of industry groups including GridWise Alliance, Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition, and the Demand and Response Smart Grid Coalition (which Google also joined recently), and it has been working with utility companies for years.

Working with EDF basically gives IBM a massive laboratory in which to build out its technology, creating, as IBM Energy and Utilities research chief Ron Ambrosio described it to Greentech Media, “a very large system of systems.” That’s reminiscent of another innovation that’s attained a bit of popularity: the network of networks, aka the Internet.

Although CCS has been touted as the answer to the problem of cleaning up coal, there are still no full-scale commercial plants using the system, in part because it carries a hefty price tag for power companies. Carbon capture alone, not including transporting and storing the CO2, can boost the cost of a power plant by 30 to 60 percent, depending on the type of plant. It can also decrease plant efficiency, according to the study, raising the cost per kilowatt-hour.

The researchers said partial capture, for both pulverized coal and integrated gasification combined cycle plant (aka “clean coal”), represents a smaller capital investment, because smaller or fewer pieces of equipment are necessary. Full capture, defined as 90 percent of emissions captured, is often accomplished with two trains of carbon dioxide absorbers and strippers, while a single train can be used for partial capture up to a certain level, according to the study. It won’t help with operating costs, though. Once the plant is up and running, the MIT study showed that the cost per ton for operating a power plant with CCS is about the same at 60 percent capture as at 90 percent.

Ashleigh Hildebrand, a graduate student in chemical engineering at MIT and co-author of the study, said in a statement that a system using partial capture could get CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants down to the emissions levels of natural gas plants. She said policies such as California’s Emissions Performance Standards could be met by coal plants using partial capture instead of relying solely on natural gas, which Hildebrand said is increasingly imported and subject to volatile prices.

Although a move to partial capture by power companies isn’t likely to satisfy the most staunch environmentalists, the researchers said it could be a viable intermediate step. The study points out that coal currently supplies more than half of all U.S. electricity, so it isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

In these tough economic times, such intermediate, and less expensive, steps may be becoming a trend. Last week, California’s Electric Power Research Institute announced that it would study a potential system that could combine solar thermal with fossil fuel. The nonprofit group plans to examine whether adding steam from solar thermal projects to conventional fossil fuel power plants can help reduce fuel costs and plant emissions.

As for carbon capture and storage, the technology took a big step forward in September when Sweden’s Vattenfall started operating a coal-fired power plant equipped with CCS technology in Germany. The company said the 30-megawatt Schwarze Pumpe pilot plant can produce 10 tons of highly concentrated CO2 per hour. The CO2 is then loaded into tankers and shipped to a nearby gas field for sequestration. However, the technology stumbled in the U.S. earlier this year when plans for a big carbon capture and storage project were dropped by the Department of Energy due to rising costs. The DOE now plans to dole out its cash to a number of smaller test projects around the country.

Hildebrand will present her findings from the MIT study tomorrow at the 9th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies in Washington, D.C. Her co-author is Howard Herzog, principal research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative and chair of the conference organizing committee.

Take the video with a grain of salt, but it does give you a glimpse at the company’s technology and gives some face time to BlackLight’s controversial founder Randall Mills, whose “hydrino theory” doesn’t quite jive with quantum mechanics.

The validation process was headed up by Rowan University’s Dr. Peter Jansson, who ambiguously concluded that “there is a novel reaction of some type causing the large exotherm which is consistently produced.” Controversy not withstanding, BlackLight has found well-heeled backers and raised $60 million for its venture.

Video courtesy of BlackLight Power.

Thermoelectrics was the most prevalent area of research, with four different projects that focused on developing materials and systems to turn heat energy directly into electricity. The hope for some of the projects is that super-efficient thermoelectric materials could replace the dirty and dangerous kerosene and wood-burning lamps and stoves used all over the developing world. A proposed solar-powered, thermoelectric stove is pictured below.

Smart grid and energy management solutions were also popular themes, including policy elements, which are often barriers in regulated markets. Meanwhile, although oil prices have come down, the technology of drilling for deep-sea petroleum also got some attention and money, although that type of drilling can also be used to further geothermal development.

See the complete list of grant recipients after the jump.

Energy Storage:

• Carbon nanotube super-springs for energy storage Carol Livermore (Mechanical Engineering)
• Supervalent battery Donald Sadoway (Materials Science and Engineering)

Energy Generation:

• The social and economic impact of micro-scale hydroelectric power: design for a randomized experiment in rural Indonesia Benjamin Olken (Economics)
• Offshore renewable energy system for generation and storage Alexander Slocum (Mechanical Engineering) and James Kirtley (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

Biofuels:

• Engineering tolerance in yeast for improved biofuel production Gregory Stephanopoulos (Chemical Engineering)

Solar:

• Solar PV-thermal hybrid for renewable energy generation in developing countries Harold Hemond (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Ahmed Ghoniem (Mechanical Engineering)
• Solar thermoelectric generator for the developing world Rajeev Ram (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

Smart Grid:

• PACEM: cooperative control for citywide energy management Harold Abelson (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
• A regionally integrated systems dynamics and energy and material flow model for the Ica region of Peru John Fernandez (Architecture), Michael Flaxman (Urban Studies and Planning), and John Sterman (Sloan School of Management)
• Do urban energy initiatives actually reduce cities’ carbon footprints? Judith Layzer (Urban Studies and Planning)

Thermoelectrics:

• A high-throughput computational approach to finding novel thermoelectric materials Gerbrand Ceder (Materials Science and Engineering)
• Scalable thermoelectric power with novel thin film technology Eugene Fitzgerald (Materials Science and Engineering) and Mayank Bulsara (Materials Processing Center)
• Photonic crystals: enabling efficient energy generation John G. Kassakian (Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems) and Marin Soljacic (Physics)

Other:

• Bioinspired hierarchical thermal materials Markus Buehler (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
• Self-powered electronic systems Anantha Chandrakasan (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
• Energy Initiative computational science: an interdisciplinary, high scale computing and algorithmic approach Alan Edelman (Mathematics) and Stephen Connors (MIT Energy Initiative)
• Millimeter wave deep drilling for geothermal energy, natural gas, and oil Paul Woskov (Plasma Science and Fusion Center) and Daniel Cohn (MIT Energy Initiative)

Genomatica, which was founded in 2000 and is backed by Mohr Davidow, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Alloy Ventures and Iceland Genomic Ventures, first started producing its green BDO back in February. Since then, it says it has increased the productivity of its generation by 1,000-fold, and has managed to engineer the organism to survive in the high BDO concentrations needed to produce a whole lot of the chemical. That means it’ll be ready to start scaling up to the volumes needed to compete in the chemical industry.

BDO is used in everyday plastics, rubbers and fibers, many of which need to withstand rugged conditions at high heats. Genomatica CEO Christopher Gann says that its green BDO can be used in any products that traditionally used BDO, such as spandex, airbags and textiles. The sugar-derived BDO molecule is “identical” to a petroleum-based BDO, Gann says. Genomatica plans to license its technology to chemical companies, sugar producers and manufacturers that use BDO, and the company hopes to sign its first major licensing deal in 2009. Gann joined the Genomatica team earlier this year after spending 27 years at Dow Chemical.

But anyone familiar with the money-making side of technology knows that Altschuler job, as EBI’s Intellectual Property Manager, is fundamental to the organization’s workings. Altschuler, who previously managed IP for Cargill for three years, works with the group’s hundreds of faculty and student researchers to get EBI’s valuable innovations patented, ensure that critical information isn’t disclosed too soon in research papers, and most importantly, he says, “help professors move forward with as little interruptions as possible.”

IP management is what will eventually help generate funds from the research, and is the reason UK oil giant BP has jumped on board. BP is eligible to license the technology, mostly in non-exclusive agreements, but in certain cases exclusive agreements, Altschuler says. BP’s early access to any breakthrough innovation at EBI could give it a leg up in the competitive world of fuel, and the public/private initiative is just one of BP’s biofuel investments.

Other BP biofuel bets include: a $60 million investment into Tropical BioEnergia, a Brazilian company that plans to build two ethanol refineries in Brazil, and a $90 million investment into cellulosic ethanol-maker Verenium to both access the startup’s technology and create a joint venture to work on cellulosic ethanol production.

We were wondering what the day-to-day work was like for Altschuler — Does he feel like “The Man” constantly imposing bureaucracy on the flowering scientific dreams of the scientists? Not so much; he says that “most scientists have been exposed to this and understand what it entails.” Mostly he makes it his goal to remove barriers so that the professors can publish papers as quickly and easily as possible.

And actually, given this is the Bay Area, the scientists could turn out to be quite entrepreneurial. Altschuler says “its still too early to tell” if there’s a wealth of professors-turned-entrepreneurs at EBI. But one of the first steps to transforming the innovations into businesses is getting that IP patented, so investors will be able to fund the lab technology with far less risk.

When we asked Altschuler if he had any running favorites when it came to research projects, he said he liked the idea of “bio-prospecting,” which is basically looking into different environments to find microbes and enzymes to mimic or cultivate and genetically modify. For example, there are EBI research teams looking at the stomaches of termites and cows to find bacteria that can help us produce better biofuels. We’ll see which of EBI’s many innovations end up being hits over the next several years, and if Altschuler does his job, hold enough intellectual property to deliver financial home runs.

The Academy gave a sneak peek to the media this week, and we snapped some photos of the new green elements. The entire roof is surrounded with a 30 foot overhang that shades the building and has a strip of 60,000 high-efficiency solar cells (seen below) in the middle that the Academy says satisfies between 5 and 10 percent of the building’s electrical needs.

More eco-eye-candy after the jump.

In addition to the solar cells, the facility boasts a 2.5 acre green roof, self-powered faucet sensors, a 100 percent recycled steel structure and uses reclaimed water from the City of San Francisco to cut its potable water use by 90 percent. And much of the old physical Academy was reused after its demolition – some 9,000 tons of concrete went into roadway construction and 12,000 tons of steel was recycled.

The building’s design started with a simple line drawing (seen above) that architect Renzo Piano drew after surveying the hilly terrain of central San Fran Francisco. Skylights (below) collect natural light and channel it into the light-hungry, four-story artificial rain forest below. Each window is equipped with a heat sensor and motor and can open and close automatically, allowing for natural ventilation.

Some images courtesy of the California Academy of Sciences.

Viruses are very orderly little critters and in high concentrations organize themselves into patterns, without high heat, toxic solvents or expensive equipment. By tweaking their DNA, the viruses, called M13, can be programmed to bind to inorganic materials, like metals and semiconductors. So far, the researchers have been able to use viruses to assemble the anode and electrolyte, two of the three main components of a battery. Eventually the work could also be used to make tiny electronics made up of silicon-covered viruses. Gross and cool.

“It’s not really analogous to anything that’s done now,” lead researcher Angela Belcher told MIT Technology Review late last year when describing her work. “It’s about giving totally new kinds of functionalities to fibers.”

The idea of thread-like electronics has gotten the interest of the Army, which has been funding Belcher’s research through the Army Research Office Institute of Collaborative Biotechnologies and the Army Research Office Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies. Theoretically, these fibers could be woven into soldiers’ uniforms allowing clothing to sense biological or chemical agents as well as collect and store energy from the sun to power any number of devices.

The team still has to create a cathode for the battery, but so far, so good; the researchers note that when a platinum cathode is attached, “the resulting electrode arrays exhibit full electrochemical functionality.” Belcher has also successfully created fibers that glow under UV light, tiny cobalt oxide wires and has even developed viruses that bind to gold. We’re still waiting to see some viral bling.