South Korean researchers have created all-carbon electronic devices that can be attached to live stag beetles to detect nerve gas agents and different environmental conditions.
The team used different catalysts to synthesize the devices to include electrodes, transistors, interconnects and sensors that can fit onto the back of a beetle, as well as onto a human fingernail, according to Discovery News.
Both carbon nanotubes and grapheme were used in the research. The device uses the nanotubes as sensors and transistors for its semiconducting properties, and the grapheme as interconnects for its pure conductor properties.
"The channel part requires semiconducting materials whose resistance can be sensitively controlled by external bias," Jang-Ung Park, assistant professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), said in an interview. "The electrode part needs metallic materials whose resistance is very small with the negligible change by external bias."
The devices were demonstrated to be able to attach to different surfaces, including paper, plants, insects, clothes, and human skin. The flexible sensors were attached to insects and plants so the researchers could determine if the devices could find low levels of DMMP vapor, which is used to create sarin, soma and other nerve agents, IEEE Spectrum reported.
Park said the devices performed as well as today's state-of-the-art sensors and can monitor temperature, pollution, humidity, infections, and other environmental conditions. The devices receive power through an antenna, making batteries unnecessary.
"We integrated antennas with our devices," Park said. "Thus, the wireless transportation of power and sensing signals was possible with no battery."
The researchers are looking to see if the sensors can be included in implantable and wearable devices, Discovery News reported.
"In this paper, we just demonstrated the detection of the nerve gas using the biocompatible devices," Park said. "As our future research, we will develop various sensing systems, including diabetes, pollutions and radioactivity, using the wearable electronic devices."
The research was published in the journal Nano Letters.
