After a trip to the Amazon jungle, President Teddy Roosevelt famously reported seeing a pack of piranhas devour a cow in a few minutes. It must have been a very large school of fish-or a very small cow. According to Ray Owczarzak, assistant curator of fishes at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, it would probably take 300 to 500 piranhas five minutes to strip the flesh off a 180-pound human. But would this attack even happen?

Piranhas get a bad rap. Yes, they are carnivorous critters with sharp teeth. "It's like they have a mouthful of scalpels," says Erica Clayton, Amazon collection manager at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Even so, instances of piranhas biting humans are extremely rare. Most are happy snacking on other fish and plants.

In general, if you leave them alone, they'll do the same for you. Still, if you decide you must take a dip in the Amazon, make sure you don't have any open wounds-the smell of blood attracts piranhas.

This article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Popular Science magazine.

The internet is a giant vault where people store some of their most private information, trusting that the company holding on to it can keep it all safe. That's not always the case, as this infographic of data breaches in recent history--by Information is Beautiful--reveals. Viruses, hacks, lost computers, accidental publishing, inside jobs and more have all been sources of major leaks over the last 9 years. The infographic identifies breaches by amount of information stolen, type of organization that was breached, year of theft, and the sensitivity of information lost or stolen. An intriguing upshot: By showing major breaches over time, the infographic illustrates how internet use has changed over the past decade. AOL (remember AOL?) has the first major breach in 2004, healthcare providers dominate leaks around 2009, and gaming companies had the major data losses in 2012.

A pair of researchers have demonstrated they're able to take over the steering and braking of two popular models of cars while someone is driving them, the BBC reported.

Cars have incorporated more and more sophisticated computing since the 1980s, making them theoretically vulnerable to software hacks. This bit of research, which was funded by the U.S.' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, shows how it might be done in the real world.

The takeover requires that the researchers' custom-made device is plugged into the car's electronic control unit, which is accessible in most cars via a connector under the dashboard. You'd notice if something were there, so it's not likely that everyday drivers have to worry about a hack like this, spokespeople from Toyota and Ford told the BBC. The two models that the researchers hacked were a 2010 Ford Escape and a 2010 Toyota Prius.

The hack was also technically advanced and difficult to put together, making it less likely to be a mass threat, researchers told the BBC. Nevertheless, the demonstration shows such a takeover is possible, Alan Woodward, a security researcher for the consulting firm Charteris, told the BBC.

One of the hack's creators, a Twitter security engineer named Charlie Miller, told the BBC he wanted manufacturers to improve security in cars.

Miller and his colleague, Chris Valasek, will present their work at Defcon in August.

[BBC]

Lenovo is either the world's biggest or second-biggest PC manufacturer, depending on who you ask (the other potential is HP), and certainly one of the best. But according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), they've been banned by spy agencies around the world, from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia, because of concerns about their hackability--and where those hacks might be coming from. Lenovo, you see, is a Chinese company, and was originally created by a wing of the Chinese government.

After Lenovo acquired IBM's PC arm in 2005, it started churning out some of the best computers on the market. Its Thinkpad line became the PC of choice for many Windows users; they totally eschewed aesthetic appeal in favor of hyper-functional, thin, and durable designs. Lately Lenovo's been stepping up its game in the looks department, and its Yoga line is one of the best-reviewed Windows 8 laptop lines out there. The Economist has a great profile of the company, if you're curious. But the main thing to know is that Lenovo was created by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a governmental organization, and still retains a sizable share of Lenovo. And spy agencies are scared of China.

So the spy agencies are concerned about its lineage. Most computer hacks (including smartphones) that we cover are software hacks, affecting individual programs, services, or entire operating systems. The NSA, in particular, already has enforced limits on what Windows machines operating on classified networks can do. But the spy agencies, including the NSA and MI6, aren't blocking all Windows machines. Instead they're afraid of hardware exploits inserted into the production line by one specific manufacturer. Says AFR:

These hardware hacks, which may include so-called hardware trojans (also known as "malicious circuits), could include all kinds of things, though AFR's sources don't specify exactly what the spy agencies are afraid of. Some hardware trojans are designed to be less reliable, causing hardware failures down the road. Some include small antennae to transmit data to an outside source.

The ban has apparently been in effect for years at some of these agencies, if only for the classified networks. One curious twist to this story is that, if we're afraid of hardware from a Chinese company, we should probably be afraid of, um, all gadgets. Pretty much every major tech company manufactures in China, from Apple to Samsung to Microsoft, and though some companies (like Google) are trying to manufacture in the States, the vast majority of electronics still comes from Chinese factories. Are they any more trustworthy than Lenovo? Who knows?

[via AFR]

The Social Security Administration has a database on names reaching back to 1880. You can check out the most popular names for any given year, but Flowing Data had the better idea of digging for "trendy" names, where "a small percentage of the baby population was given a name one year and a relatively much higher percentage of the next year's baby population got said name."

For example: Do you remember the 1977 Steely Dan album Aja? Because in 1978 it was likely responsible for the appearance of the name Aja for girls. Some of the impetuses are a little more opaque than that, though: it's not clear why there was a spike in the name "Deneen" in 1964, and could secondary Laguna Beach reality-T.V. star Talan Torriero be responsible for that many baby boys named Talan?

Here's the full list, but be sure to check out the original Flowing Data post for more info on how the data was collected.

[Flowing Data]

New York's Bank of America Tower, a sprawling, 1,200-foot skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, was lauded as a triumph of green engineering when it opened in 2010. But as the New Republic is reporting today, the building doesn't come close to living up to that hype: Sam Roudman writes that "the Bank of America Tower produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan." How'd that happen? Poor metrics for measuring efficiency, mostly, which is a problem that goes beyond a single skyscraper. Read the whole piece here.

Just in case the cosmos are not fantastic enough for you: This new video shows time lapses of the night sky over enormous metal dragons, dinosaurs and other creatures in Galleta Meadows in the desert town of Borrego Springs, California.

The sculptures include wild horses, battling insects, an extinct elephant relative, and other animals, whether real, imaginary, extinct or extant. They stand on land once owned by local businessman Dennis Avery, who commissioned them from sculptor Ricardo Abreceda and left them open for public viewing.

BORREGO STARDANCE from Sunchaser Pictures on Vimeo.

Borrego Springs is a small, inland town with little light pollution, the result of conscious efforts by the town to regulate outdoor lighting. It sounds ideal for stargazing, even for those without particular videography skills. Want to visit? It's about three hours southeast of Los Angeles by car. Be warned, temperatures can reach the 110s Fahrenheit.

The video itself was made by an indie production company called Sunchaser Pictures. The team previously made gorgeous video time lapses of Death Valley's night sky, using similar techniques.

The "Starry Night"-like lines in some parts of the Borrego Springs video were created by tracking stars' movement with 25-second exposures:

And here's the Milky Way:

We've spilled a lot of virtual ink over vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-grid communications. Both are promising technologies that could substantially reduce the number of traffic accidents and fatalities by allowing cars, traffic lights, and other elements of the driving environment to "talk" to one another, spotting trouble long before it happens.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been testing such systems in six U.S. cities. Now, according to NBC News, the National Transportation Safety Board is calling for an accelerated rollout of the technology on new cars.

The NTSB's recommendations come in the wake of two fatal school bus crashes-one in New Jersey, the other in Florida. In both cases, large trucks collided with buses at intersections, causing the deaths of young students.

From a technological perspective, the deployment of V2V and V2G systems makes a great deal of sense. Compared to other devices scheduled to appear on cars in the near future-devices like data recorders and backup cameras-V2V and V2G would likely result in exponentially safer roads and up to 81 percent fewer collisions.

What's more, the basic technology behind V2V and V2G systems already exists, and it could theoretically be scaled up fairly quickly. There are, however, at least three hurdles to overcome: bandwidth, money, and the law:

By "bandwidth", we don't mean the speed of the networks carrying and analyzing all this new data (though that could be a major concern in some areas). Instead, we mean the ability of corporations and governments to develop and install the devices, and subsequently, assess the findings.

This would likely be easier for car companies, who would simply need to place electronic beacons on vehicles. It could be much harder for cash-strapped municipalities to install cameras at every intersection. And of course, for every car or signal light without those devices, the systems become slightly less effective.

Then there's the question of money. The new technology would likely keep motorists safer on the roads, but how much would new-car buyers be willing to shell out for it? How would cities pay for all the devices used to monitor traffic?

Legal hurdles are even more complicated. As with autonomous cars (in which V2V and V2G technology will play a major role), there's the question of fault to consider. If accidents happen after the systems debut-as they surely will-who's at fault? The drivers? The automaker? The device manufacturer? The entity that monitors the network? And who's responsible for maintaining that network anyway?

There are other issues to consider, too-not least of which is the issue of privacy. After all, in order for these networks to function properly, they'll need to track every car's location, and if they're tracking every car's location...well, you see where that could lead.

And let's not forget about hacking: when we move from closed-car systems to true car networks, our vehicles become far more vulnerable to baddies.

Don't get us wrong: we're big fans of V2V and V2G. Besides, these tech genies are already out of the bottle, and there's no shoving them back in. It's not a question of if these networks will arrive, but when.

Before that happens, though, the NTSB, NHTSA, and many other organizations need to lay out new ground rules, because this is a whole new ball game.

This article, written by Richard Read, was originally published on The Car Connection, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow The Car Connection on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Gary Shteyngart, author of the lovely Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, was one of the unlikeliest winners of one of Google's first test pairs of Google Glass. Super Sad True Love Story is highly skeptical that technology will actually improve our lives rather than imprison us; featured in the story are "credit poles" that broadcast your financial solvency as you walk by and a national obsession with fitness monitoring and life extension. It's a grim, paranoid technocrat vision of the future, so we were tickled when Shteyngart applied for Google Glass by tweeting "#ifihadglass I could dream up new ideas for the TV adaptation of my novel Super Sad True Love Story." And now he's written about his experience wearing Glass at The New Yorker. It's a great read, and especially moving when he translates "hamburger" into his native Russian.

BMW isn't entirely new to electric vehicles, or EVs; the company has been testing an electric Mini Cooper for awhile now, and we actually wrote about the i3 two years back, when it seemed like just a concept. But now the i3 is officially seeing a release, and it's the first BMW that was designed from the ground up to be an electric car. The benefits are pretty obvious: it's the lightest EV out there, with one of the quickest charging times and excellent performance. And it looks pretty weird, just like an electric vehicle should.

One of the things we really like about the i3 is that it looks different. Lots of EVs attempt to blend in, to be normal-looking cars that just happen to have a totally different engine system, but that's going to lead to inefficiencies, because EVs have different needs, different strengths and weaknesses, than traditional gas, diesel, or hybrid cars.

The i3 is small, shaped like a hatchback, but it's got four doors, unlike the classic Mini Cooper. The rear doors are suicide-style, with the hinge at the rear of the car rather than the middle. The motor is mounted in the back, like an old VW Beetle, and there's no transmission column at all. Who needs one? That means the floor is completely flat, even right down the middle, where the transmission tunnel usually is.

BMW also took a big leap with the materials, constructing the main chassis from carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic. EVs are typically limited in power and have to lug along lots of batteries, which are super heavy, so it makes sense to lighten the load elsewhere. This reinforced plastic is, according to BMW, just as strong as steel or aluminum, but 50 percent lighter than the former and 30 percent lighter than the latter. The interior materials too are sustainable, with recycled plastic, sustainable woods, and trim from a plant we'd never heard of: the kenaf plant. (Kenaf is a plant in the hibiscus family that looks sort of like bamboo and is used to make super strong, super cheap woven material, sort of like burlap. But you can also process and then harden the pulp, which looks like hardwood and doesn't require the chopping down of rare slow-growing hardwood trees.)

The dashboard is also hyper-modern and weird. Instead of a traditional mounted display for navigation and things like that, there's a pair of what look like Nexus 7s (they aren't actually Nexus 7s, as far as I can tell) propped up on the dash. The one in front of the driver shows your typical dials--RPM, speed, charge level--and the one in the center, which looks almost like it's floating, gives access to navigation, music, and connection to your phone.

Under the hood, so to speak, it's got a 170hp engine delivering 184 pound-feet of torque. The lithium-ion battery delivers 22 kWh, which BMW says will give you a range of about 80-100 miles per charge. For comparison, the Chevy Volt's all-electric range is about 25-50 miles, though it supplements that with gas, and the Nissan Leaf has tested anywhere from about 60 to about 120 miles, though the average is probably closer to 60. The i3 will go from 0-60 in under 7 seconds, which is about average for an EV. More important is the charging time, which BMW says is only three hours over a 220-volt line, thanks to a charger that's the largest of any EV on the road. Using a "fast charger" like the Combo, BMW says that time can be shortened to 30 minutes.

The car weighs only 2,700 pounds, much lighter than the Leaf and the Volt, which both weigh around 3,500 pounds. You can add a small gas engine as well, which will double the range and add 34 hp, but will also bump the weight by over 300 pounds and add a few thousand dollars to the price.

The BMW i3 should be on sale here in the U.S. by early 2014, with a sticker price of $41,350 before any incentives (which include a $7,500 federal rebate). Pretty cheap, compared to other BMWs! You can read more about it on BMW's extremely pretty (and heavy) site.

Orange growers are considering genetically modifying your morning OJ. Why? A terrible disease-Scientific American calls it "the most devastating disease of citrus plants in the world"-is spreading in the U.S. "Five years from now, there may be no more Florida orange juice," one University of Florida scientist, J. Glenn Morris, told Scientific American.

The plant illness, called citrus greening, makes trees drop their leaves and stunts their fruit. It is very virulent. There's no known treatment for sick trees, nor any pesticide that is able to kill sufficient numbers of the illness' carrier, an insect called the Asian citrus psyllid, to totally prevent the disease's spread.

Scientists have gradually concluded that the only way to combat citrus greening is by engineering a resistant tree, The New York Times reports. That's not a decision to make lightly, however. For one, it'll be difficult and expensive. It may take a decade and $20 million, The New York Times reports. And, perhaps more importantly, there may be a consumer backlash.

This is poised to be a prime case study about how loudly consumer dollars can speak about genetic engineering. Orange growers aren't the only ones who have historically avoided genetic modification because they know many shoppers are against it. Two years ago, I talked with scientists who work on creating new commercial strawberry breeds. They told me the berry industry meticulously breeds new plant types in the old-fashioned way-it involves brushing pollen from one plant onto another using a tiny paintbrush-because researchers fear that consumers won't eat GMO berries.

Major science organizations haveconcluded that just because a food is genetically modified doesn't necessarily mean it harms human health. Nevertheless, many consumers find GMOs strange or scary. Some individuals and organizations worry that GMOs have long-term risks that studies haven't yet detected. Such worries come through in Europe's stringent genetically modified food laws and recent ballot initiatives in the U.S. to label genetically modified items.

Without headlines like "The End of Orange Juice," the story of a citrus disease sounds boring. Yet citrus greening articles are among the most fun science stories I've read this year. They're kind of detective stories-you have to hunt down where the disease came from-with plenty of action-you've got to reduce infections somehow. The New York Times piece is a fascinating read, bringing in the emotions around genetic engineering as well as the ominous danger to the fruit.

The Change

Aviation has always run on petroleum. In fact, jet fuel had been the same from the dawn of the jet age up until about three years ago. Then the airline industry changed international jet-fuel specifications to allow the use of renewable fuel sources. Airlines can now use renewables alongside jet fuel in a 50 percent blend. Already, as an industry, we've flown 1,500 flights with passengers-real revenue flights-with sustainable biofuels.

The Fuels

With our current biofuels mix, we typically get an improvement in efficiency of 1 to 3 percent. We can design out some of the impurities that come in petroleum, and we can control properties like freeze point. For very-long-haul flights at high altitude across the polar caps, you might like a fuel that doesn't freeze when you're flying at 35,000 feet. We can actually design in those properties.

The Future

We're just at the beginning with biofuels. At Boeing, we're convinced that they could significantly reduce the carbon life-cycle footprint-that's been demonstrated. We think there's even possibilities that they can reduce it all the way to zero or, in some cases, push it negative. And it can be 100 percent of the fuel, as opposed to 50 percent now-there's no impediment to making it entirely from renewables.

Billy Glover is the vice president for global business development and policy at Boeing.

This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

Even though every respectable regulatory service says shooting wolves in and around Yellowstone National Park is bad for everyone involved, wolves are still being shot. Well, add one more paper to the pile: a new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology finds that the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has had a positive effect on the population of...wait, what? Grizzly bears? How?

Putting together the puzzle pieces of a diverse ecosystem like Yellowstone is tricky; shooting wolves is like pulling out a piece of an enormous Jenga game. Some parts seem unaffected, some parts are distinctly less balanced, and eventually the whole game will crash. This study looks at how the wolf affects the ecosystem as a whole, and, as we thought, wolves are an essential part of the health of Yellowstone.

The iconic, endangered-in-the-U.S. grizzly bear relies on lots of fruit, especially berries, when preparing for its winter hibernation. High in sugar and containing lots of important vitamins, the berries, including serviceberry, chokecherry, buffaloberry, twinberry, huckleberry, and others, and make up a substantial portion of the grizzly's diet in the summertime. A lower amount of berries has been found to have a negative effect on the survival and reproductive abilities of grizzlies the following year.

There have been quite a few low-berry years lately. That problem, says the study, can be attributed to the lack of wolves in Yellowstone: wolves typically prey on the abundant elk herds in the park. Elk eat berries, just like the bears do. But without wolves, the elk population has exploded, which means there's hardly any berries left for the bears. So the bears aren't as well fed, which makes them less healthy.

And it's not even just as simple as that. The elk are eating so many berries, including the entire berry shrubs, that animals that rely on the shrubs, like bees and butterflies, are also in decline. The bears, without access to the fruit they'd normally be eating, have to eat more meat, which means they sometimes prey on elk, but just as often on livestock nearby. And that makes the ranchers angry, and the ranchers shoot bears or wolves or whatever else they feel like, because Wyoming does not know or care how ecosystems work. (Neither does Friends of the Yellowstone Elk Herd, a pro-hunting organization.)

But the reintroduction of wolves, the study finds, has had a marked improvement on that entire system. The researchers, from Oregon State University and Washington State University, analyzed grizzly bear scat and found that the percentage of berries in the scat has doubled since the reintroduction of the wolves. Turns out the two most iconic animals of Yellowstone depend on each other in more ways than we thought.

[via PhysOrg]

Over 25 years, Danh Trinh had amassed thousands of screws, hinges, and other parts in his workshop. He filed them away in labeled drawers, but locating them still wasn't easy. To solve that problem, he built StorageBot: a robotic organizer that summons components at the sound of his voice. Trinh first crafted a wooden cabinet to stack nine plastic storage boxes-each holding 40 drawers-into a grid. Then he installed stepper motors and pulleys to move behind the shelf along two axes. They connect to a rack-and-pinion system that pushes the drawers open. When a laptop recognizes a voice command, it feeds the data to an Arduino microcontroller, which operates the drawer-opening system and a border of LEDs. "The LEDs indicate the row and column of the drawer that is about to open," Trinh says. Now if he needs a hinge, he doesn't have to halt a project to get one. "Anything that breaks away from your brainstorming impedes your train of thought."

Time: 3 months
Cost: About $700

This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

It would have taken quite a few turns for natural selection to have produced dragons, but if you're willing to stretch a bit, most classic dragon characteristics do exist in other species. They just don't come packaged in one animal.

First up on the dragon checklist: flying. Dragon wings are usually depicted in one of two ways-a third pair of limbs connected to the backbone, or webbed forearms. Jack Conrad, a paleontologist and reptile expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, thinks the latter is more plausible.

"It seems that six appendages are very unlikely in vertebrates," he says. "The only thing close to having six limbs are these frogs in the western part of the U.S. that get this bad parasite and end up generating extra limbs. Even then, the new limbs are identical to the hind limbs, and the frogs don't do well. It seems that anytime nature tries to generate a vertebrate hexapod, it dies. That seems to be the main limitation."

In Conrad's opinion, the leathery wings of a pterosaur are the best possible flight mechanism for a giant lizard. "Quetzalcoatlus had a 30-foot wingspan," he says. "That would do the trick." Big, strong wings are necessary to compensate for the weight of a dragon's skin, which, of course, would need to withstand bow-and-arrow attacks. "Let's throw a little alligator in there for armor," Conrad says. An alligator's skin, he explains, is made partly of bony plates. When European settlers first encountered the reptiles, the skin proved to be tough enough to turn away a musket ball, plenty strong for a dragon.

OK, so we've got a very large alligator with the wings of a pterosaur that can repel musket fire. Now it just needs to breathe flames. This is where no parallel exists-there are no known animals that can spit fire or even a flammable liquid. But there are some beetles that can shoot caustic chemicals from their abdomen that can burn people's skin, so it's not totally out of the question that some animal at some point in time could make a flammable liquid. Cobras can spit venom with great accuracy at objects six feet away; the dragon could borrow that ability to propel the flammable liquid. As for lighting it? "Well, maybe, if you had some specialized organ like an electric eel's tail dangling in the mouth, that could spark that liquid and allow the creature to breathe fire," Conrad says. "Of course, this is all very theoretical."

This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of Popular Science magazine.

In 1960, Americans could expect to live, on average, to just before 70. In 1900-just about the time period of Downton Abbey-the life expectancy was somewhere in the mid-40s. Today, the average American life expectancy is about 78. Although some groups have seen their average life expectancies decline slightly in recent years, in general, Americans now live much longer than their grandparents and great-grandparents did.

"People are living longer. What nobody really knew was if they were living healthier," David Cutler, an economist at Harvard University, told Popular Science. "That's really just as important as, 'Are we living longer?' What's the quality of those years?"

Cutler and two colleagues recently did some research that suggests Americans really have added healthy years to their lives. The economists found that on average, the period of poor quality of life just before death in the U.S. has decreased to just one or two years, so that the number of good years people live has increased with increased life expectancy. "That's a little bit of good news on the public health agenda," Cutler says.

His and his colleagues' study is a look into what it's like to age in the U.S. today. It could also help the government make better estimates of healthcare costs in the future, because whether elderly Americans are sick or healthy affects how much their care will cost, Cutler says.

People have long debated whether Americans are actually getting good years out of their increased longevity. Researchers have argued both sides. (Likely your parents and friends have thought about this, too.)

What was missing was actual data on when individuals, with whatever particular health problems they had, died. Instead, many studies would survey elderly people at a moment in time, then use mathematical models to guess when those people were likely to die. By using Medicare data, Cutler says, "We know exactly how far people are from death."

He and his colleagues linked people's health data to their death records, so they had a full picture of individuals' path through time. The Medicare data also helped the researchers track many people, more than 10,000 Americans aged 65 and over, for every year between 1991 and 2009.

The researchers found several trends. The number of people with disabilities that impair their everyday functioning has fallen over time. The number of people sick with diseases is rising, however. It seems Americans are getting more diseases, but the diseases don't doom them to disability the way they used to.

The study wasn't set up to examine why Americans are enjoying more healthy years, but Cutler has some ideas from his results and from studies others have done. "A part of the decline is that we're having fewer heart attacks, strokes and so on. You know, people are taking Lipitor and things. And a part of it is that we're treating people better when they have heart attacks and strokes," he says.

He and his colleagues presented their research at a conference hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank, in May.

A team of scientists at the University of Michigan has discovered that when stretched to their limits, gold nanoparticles embedded into elastic material self-assemble into conductive pathways. The finding has applications for flexible electronics and gentle medical devices.

For their experiment, lead researchers Nicholas Kotov and Yoonseob Kim applied gold nanoparticles to a sample of polyurethane. Observing the effects with an electron microscope, the team slowly began to stretch the material. The nanoparticles responded to the tension by rearranging themselves into chains.

Kotov and Kim tested two versions of the material. The first involved alternating layers of polyurethane and nanoparticles, which can conduct 11,000 Siemens per centimeter (S/cm) at its original size. After being stretched to more than twice its length, the material still managed to conduct at 2,400 S/cm.

The second version of the material was a filtered solution with a natural conductance of 1,800 S/cm. At 5.8 times its original length, it could conduct 35 S/cm.

Capitalizing on this characteristic behavior of nanoparticles to organize into chains could lead to advancements in flexible consumer electronics, from cell phones to prosthetic limbs.

Kim and Kotov are particularly interested in the potential application for brain implants. They view their highly resilient conductors as electrodes. Rigid electrodes within the brain create scar tissue and damage cells. Kim and Kotov say their discovery would be as pliable as the surrounding tissue, alleviating effects of diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Listen to Kim and Kotov describe their discovery in the video below.