The document discusses 8 unusual inks, including edible ink that can be used in home printers, DNA ink containing a person's DNA, invisible ink that fades after 24 hours, eco-friendly ink made from corn, nano ink for printing solar cells, silver nanoparticle ink for flexible microelectrodes, gold 'fountain pen' ink for electronics, and bio ink for growing multiple tissues.
2. Edible Ink The Californian company Kopykake have created edible ink cartridges (the ink’s edible, not the cartridge) that can be used in your home Canon or Epson printer.
3. DNA Ink DNA is extracted painlessly from a human (or animal) hair or nail, and then mixed with ordinary ink to create DNA-enriched ink: the ultimate in vanity press. It’s already been used to add a personal touch to several self-published autobiographies
4. Invisible Ink Paper is coated with photosensitive chemicals that darken when exposed to UV light produced by a special printer. Whatever is printed onto the page fades away after 24 hours.
5. Eco Ink The Big Print, a printing company in Seattle, have become one of the first to trial a new eco friendly type of ink made from ethyl lactate, which is derived from corn, which unlike traditional petroleum-based inks, is both renewable and biodegradable.
6. Nano Ink An ingenious type of ink that makes it possible to print the CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) semiconductor of a high-performance solar cell in exactly the right atomic ratios, making mass production quicker and easier.
7. Silver Nanoparticle Ink The University of Illinois have developed a new type of silver-based ink, made from silver nanoparticles, which can be used to create microelectrodes that carry signals between circuit elements. These microelectrodes can be stretched and bent repeatedly with little change in their electrical properties.
8. Gold ‘Fountain Pen’ Ink The electrical properties of these 5 mincron thick stripes can be customised by changing the power of an Argon laser and scanning speed, providing an exciting new way of creating miniature resistors and conductive tracks for flexible electronics.
9. Bio Ink A research team has already managed to grow muscle and bone in the same dish, the first time more than one type of tissue has been grown from a single population of stem cells. They hope this technology can one day be used to repair various tissues at the same time.
