Skip to main content

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

3 comments

This Tiny Implant Folds Like Origami, Then Unfolds Inside Your Body To Monitor Your Health

The human skin is the body's largest organ and one of its most important defenses. It protects us from harmful pathogens while preventing vital fluids from escaping. But this strong protective barrier also creates a major challenge for scientists developing wearable health sensors. Many important chemical signals inside the body cannot easily pass through the skin.

Doctors can overcome this problem with implants such as continuous glucose monitors and cochlear implants. However, many existing implants can be relatively bulky, require batteries or involve invasive surgery. Smaller wireless and battery-free devices offer another option, but they often have limited surface area. This can weaken wireless power transfer and reduce the performance of their sensors.

Now, researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Southern California have developed a device designed to overcome these limitations. Called MiFi, or the Minimally Invasive Foldable bioelectronic implant, it is a tiny, origami-inspired implant that can change its shape depending on what is needed.

The device can be folded into a compact form for insertion and then unfold inside the body. This allows it to be small enough to reduce the need for major surgery while becoming large enough after implantation to support wireless power components and several sensors.

Details of the technology and its development have been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Inspired by Origami

One of MiFi's most interesting features is its foldable structure. The device is made from flexible polyimide materials and has an accordion-like design. This structure allows the implant to collapse into a much smaller shape before insertion.

Once inside the body, the device can autonomously unfold and return to its larger, flat configuration.

This solves a major problem in implant design. A device needs to be small during implantation to make the procedure as simple and minimally invasive as possible. At the same time, it needs enough space after implantation to accommodate useful sensors and wireless components.

When fully unfolded, MiFi forms a square measuring about 2.1 by 2.1 centimeters. Despite its relatively large surface area, the device is only around 0.3 millimeters thick.

The researchers describe this as a "transient geometry," meaning the implant has one shape when it is being inserted and another when it is functioning inside the body.

No Bulky Battery Required

Another important feature is that MiFi does not depend on a large battery.

Instead, it uses near-field communication, or NFC, to receive power and transmit information. NFC is the same short-range wireless technology commonly used in contactless payment systems.

A nearby reader can provide the energy needed by the implant while also receiving data from its sensors. This approach could make the device smaller, lighter and potentially easier to use than implants that require built-in batteries.

The researchers tested the wireless system using a model made from pig skin. The results showed that MiFi could transmit data through more than 20 millimeters of tissue.

This is important because the wireless signal must travel through biological tissue before reaching an external reader. The results suggest that the system could communicate with a device placed close to the skin.

What Can MiFi Measure?

The researchers developed different versions of MiFi to demonstrate its potential for monitoring several conditions inside the body.

The device can measure heart rate and breathing rate, while other sensors can monitor temperature, tissue acidity and lithium levels.

The lithium sensor is particularly interesting. Lithium is used in some medicines, but maintaining the right amount in the body is important because the safe range can be relatively narrow. Excessive lithium levels can become toxic.

A device capable of monitoring lithium ions in the fluid surrounding cells could potentially provide doctors with information about medication levels without requiring repeated blood tests.

This demonstrates the broader potential of the technology. Instead of measuring only one health signal, future versions of such implants could potentially monitor several biological markers at the same time.

Tested in Living Tissue

To investigate whether the technology could operate in biological environments, the researchers carried out experiments using tissue samples and anesthetized rats.

The MiFi devices were implanted beneath the skin of the rats to demonstrate how the foldable system could be introduced into living tissue and operate after unfolding.

These experiments are an important early step, but the technology is still at the research stage. Animal and tissue experiments do not establish that a device is ready for use in humans. Additional studies will be needed to evaluate its long-term safety, reliability and performance before human clinical trials can be considered.

A New Approach to Personalized Healthcare

The potential advantage of MiFi is its combination of three features: minimally invasive insertion, a relatively large sensing area and wireless, battery-free operation.

Traditional implants often involve a trade-off. Making a device smaller can make implantation easier, but it can also leave less room for sensors and wireless components. Making the device larger can improve performance but may require a more invasive procedure.

MiFi's foldable design attempts to overcome this compromise by allowing the implant to be compact during insertion and larger when it is performing its job.

In the future, similar technology could potentially be used to monitor multiple signals from inside the body at the same time. Such systems could provide doctors with more continuous information about a patient's condition and reduce the need for some repeated procedures.

The technology could be particularly valuable for personalized healthcare, where treatment decisions are increasingly based on information collected from individual patients.

The researchers say their approach could eventually enable multiple types of biological measurements through quick, suture-free insertion procedures.

Looking Ahead

MiFi represents an intriguing step toward a new generation of miniature medical implants. Its origami-inspired structure allows it to solve a difficult engineering problem: being small enough to insert with minimal disruption while expanding to provide enough space for sensors and wireless electronics.

Its ability to operate without a bulky battery and monitor several biological signals adds further potential.

However, significant development remains before such a system could be used routinely in people. Researchers will need to establish how safely the device can be implanted, how long it can function, how accurately it can measure biological signals and whether it can reliably communicate through human tissue.

If these challenges can be overcome, foldable implants such as MiFi could change the way certain health conditions are monitored. Instead of relying only on occasional blood tests or larger implanted devices, doctors could one day use tiny wireless sensors to gather valuable information directly from inside the body.

For now, MiFi remains an experimental technology, but its clever combination of flexible materials, foldable design, wireless power and multiple sensors offers a promising glimpse of what the future of minimally invasive healthcare could look like.

Reference: S. Olenik, J. D. Goodwin, A. Naik, et al. “ A Geometrically Transient Platform for Bioelectronic Implants.” Advanced Materials (2026): e73923. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.73923

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

For years, scientists believed that adding even one qubit (a unit of quantum information) to a black hole needed energy. This was based on the idea that a black hole’s entropy must increase with more information, which means it must gain energy. But a new study by Jonah Kudler-Flam and Geoff Penington changes that thinking. They found that quantum information can be teleported into a black hole without adding energy or increasing entropy . This works through a process called black hole decoherence , where “soft” radiation — very low-energy signals — carry information into the black hole. In their method, the qubit enters the black hole while a new pair of entangled particles (like Hawking radiation) is created. This keeps the total information balanced, so there's no violation of the laws of physics. The energy cost only shows up when information is erased from the outside — these are called zerobits . According to Landauer’s principle, erasing information always needs energy. But ...
3 comments
Read more

A New Type of Wormhole Could Slowly Become Stable Over Time, Scientists Suggest

For many years, wormholes have captured the imagination of scientists and science fiction fans. They are often shown as magical tunnels through space that can connect two faraway places in the universe. If wormholes really exist, they could one day make it possible to travel huge distances in a very short time. But there is one big problem—no one has ever found a real wormhole. They remain only theoretical objects predicted by the mathematics of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Even though they have never been observed, physicists continue studying them because they help us understand the limits of gravity and spacetime. Now, researchers Ditta and Channuie have proposed a new model of a time-dependent traversable wormhole . Unlike many earlier models, their wormhole is not completely still. Instead, it changes with time because energy flows through it. As this flow slowly fades away, the wormhole naturally becomes stable. Their study offers a new and simple way to understan...
Post a Comment
Read more

Black Holes That Never Dies

Black holes are powerful objects in space with gravity so strong that nothing can escape them. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can slowly lose energy by giving off tiny particles. This process is called Hawking radiation . Over time, the black hole gets smaller and hotter, and in the end, it disappears completely. But new research by Menezes and his team shows something different. Using a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) , they studied black holes with quantum corrections. In their model, the black hole does not vanish completely. Instead, it stops shrinking when it reaches a very small size. This leftover is called a black hole remnant . They also studied something called grey-body factors , which affect how much energy escapes from a black hole. Their findings show that the black hole cools down and stops losing mass once it reaches a minimum mass . This new model removes the idea of a “singularity” at the center of the black hole and gives us a better ...
Post a Comment
Read more