ZAP a bath of water and gold with electricity and you can make tiny wires
grow spontaneously. If they break, the strands can even fix
themselves—which could make them perfect for connections between implants
and living tissue.
This weird wire effect was discovered accidentally by Jacob Williams while he
was a student doing summer work in Orlin Velev’s lab at the University of
Delaware. Williams, now at Carnegie Mellon University, was experimenting with
chunks of latex and gold nanoparticles in a box of water sandwiched between two
metal electrodes. When he applied a voltage, he expected the latex to…
