You can be on Entrepreneur’s cover!

Check This Out: Edible Sensors Tell You When Your Food Has Gone Bad Tiny, biodegradable sensors could have big potential for all sorts of medical- and food-related industries.

By Katherine Gray

entrepreneur daily

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

What's worse than when you pour a bowl-full of milk onto your morning cereal and take a nice big spoonful only to discover that the milk has gone sour? OK, there are other worse things, but it's still really gross.

Hu "Tiger" Tao, a post-doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is working on a chewable sensor that may provide a solution to the problem of spoiled food, Fast Company reported. The new technology uses a surprisingly old substance: silk.

Silk has been used for millennia in cloth, and more recent applications have included all sorts of medical, scientific and electronic uses. Tao's design uses tiny gold antennae embedded in a purified silk substrate that can be dunked into liquids like milk or pasted onto eggs or bananas or other foods using the silk's own sticky, glue-like properties. The sensors monitor food quality, alerting you when your fruit is ripe or your milk starts to go bad.

The technology is similar to the sort used in RFID chips that keep track of pets or livestock, in electronic toll collection and all sorts of other devices. Using what's called dielectric properties -- chemical changes that occur as a fruit ripens or rots, for example -- the sensors emit an electromagnetic signal that can be monitored by a reader.

An app on your smartphone could presumably pick up those signals and be programmed to let you know when that avocado sitting on your counter is perfectly ready to become guacamole.

The crazy thing about the sensors Tao and his collaborators created is that they are completely edible. The gold is as thin as the gold leaf used in fancy desserts, and the pure protein of the silk substrate is easily digestible. The whole thing is flexible, and since the silk itself is what holds it on the object to be monitored, there's no need for any additional glue.

There are countless other applications for this amazing technology. "Electronic skin," for example, could use flexible electronics to wirelessly track health statistics, monitoring blood pressure and other vital signs. Since the sensors are completely edible and biodegradable, the potential relevance for healthcare and food and consumer markets is huge.

Imagine waving your phone over a table full of melons and picking out the one that's perfectly ripe, every time. Friends, this is progress.

What crazy apps and gadgets have you come across lately? Let us know by emailing us at FarOutTech@entrepreneur.com or by telling us in the comments below.

Katherine Gray is a freelance writer, photographer and desktop publisher based in western Maryland.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick

Business News

Mark Zuckerberg Told Meta Engineers to 'Figure Out' Snapchat's Privacy Protections: 'We Have No Analytics on Them'

Recently unsealed court documents detail "Project Ghostbusters," Meta's project to work around Snapchat's end-to-end encryption to intercept data.

Business News

Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison for Multibillion-Dollar Crypto Fraud

Southern District of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the loss amount to the victims of Bankman-Fried's crimes surpassed $550 million.

Growing a Business

The Brand Whiz Behind Sun Bum Is Famous For Making Boring Products Fun. Then, This One Stumped Him.

Everything Tom Rinks touched turned to gold until he took on a brand launch at Target that fizzled. Then, he found a creepy doll on Ebay, and he saw a way forward.

Thought Leaders

How To Improve Your Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence in 7 Easy Steps

Using these simple but effective approaches will help a person in their business, life and relationships.