It goes without saying that accidents don’t announce themselves beforehand with a loudspeaker – in fact, it works in the total opposite manner, by creeping up on you and before you know it, it has overtaken you. Getting your basics right when building an office block or a bridge is important to make sure the structure remains as sound as ever many years down the road, but sometimes, the unexpected does happen. Since prevention is better than cure, we are interested in the color-changing stress sensor that might be a potential life saver – it measures a handful of nanometers in size, changing color whenever it detects some stress at important points in a particular structure.
This is made possible thanks to bioengineers and chemists from the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, where a simple color change will suffice to warn building inspectors that remedial work needs to be carried out lest a national disaster happens.
Using a couple of molecules – porphyrins, a class of naturally occurring pigments, and polymersomes, artificially engineered capsules which can carry a molecular payload in their hollow interiors, they will work in tandem as stress sensors, with their membranes being embedded with a special kind of light-emitting porphyrins to boot. Will it change the way we construct buildings? Perhaps, but more research needs to be done before this is standardized.
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