How is the Iron Man suit made? We admire the result in the movie (still number one this week at the box office); the comic book version states that the Iron Man suit circuits were created using a process called biological circuit fabrication:
“Micro-Scale suit tiles fabricated by genetically engineered metal affinity bacteria which assemble themselves in specific orderly arrays, then expire, leaving behind various metallic deposits which form all the metal shapes and microscopic circuits.”
Now, a group of scientists led by Michael Sussman, director of University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Biotechnology Center, and oceanography professor Virginia Armbrust of the University of Washington, are seeing if diatoms will help make even smaller integrated circuit chips by a similar process of biological fabrication.