I know it's an April Fool's Day thing, but this is a super serious story (read: not an April Fool's joke). It may not look like the image above (I'm not complaining), but in the field of sustainable electronics research, chitin will play a major role in advanced nanocarbon manufacturing in the future. In other words, the next PC components could be made of crab shells. [A research paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C (via phys.org) points out that pyrolysis of chitin nanofiber paper, a natural resource rich in nitrogen, could dramatically improve the nanocarbon manufacturing process in both efficiency and sustainability He points out that.

Chitin, a biopolymer derived from crab shells, has been shown by this study to be more efficient in producing nanocarbon materials than conventional methods. This is due to its molecular structure, which creates its own source of natural defects needed to make it usable. This means one less manufacturing process and less demand on non-renewable resources.

For the electronics industry, this is already a double win. In addition, these chitin nanofiber papers show potential for use in optical sensors and electrodes for effective supercapacitors. Not only do chitin optical sensors have low resistance to light, but chitin electrodes have also shown great potential. Superconductor electrodes essentially store charge in an electric field. Using chitin nanocarbons, their "specific capacitance" has been reported to be higher than many alternative non-sustainable nanocarbon materials today

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Thus, in the near future, these porous 3D nanostructures made of crab chitin may be used to design efficient charge networks, optical sensors, and even electrolytes and reactants.

Co-author Hirotaka Koga states, "We have demonstrated the usefulness of a resource that is generally considered a waste product and demonstrated the feasibility of sustainable electronics."

Crab computer. The Future.