A new so-called cyberwood that continues to work even after its living components die could lead to technological advances in thermal night-vision cameras and temperature sensors.

This "zombie" cyborg wood is a hybrid material made of tobacco laced withteensy carbon tubes, and the whole contraption can act like a heat detector even after the plant cells have perished.

Currently, electronic thermometers and thermal night-vision cameras sense heat by using materials whose electrical conductivity changes as the temperature changes. The best heat-detecting materials available now change their electrical conductivity just by a few percent per degree temperature change.

In contrast, the new cyberwood that the scientists created is hundreds of times more responsive to changes in temperature than the best man-made materials currently used in heat detectors. Samples of cyberwood were sensitive enough to detect people from only their body heat from a distance of up to 31.5 inches (80 centimeters) away. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

Prior research had revealed that living plants are exceptionally sensitive to changes in temperature. Their sensitivity is based on the behavior of chemicals within the cell walls of the plants. However, this sensitivity fades after the cells die.

To create a material with the potential to be as temperature-sensitive as plants, scientists watered tobacco cells with a solution loaded with carbon nanotubes, hollow pipes just nanometers (billionths of a meter) in diameter. Although carbon nanotubes are only about the width of a strand of DNA, they are about 100 times stronger than steel and only one-sixth as heavy. Moreover, their conductive properties for both electricity and heat rival those of the best metal conductors.

The carbon nanotubes formed a complex network among the plant cells and partially infiltrated the plant cell walls. The resulting cyberwood has a microscopic structure that resembles that of natural wood, and mechanical properties similar to those of balsam fir, a kind of pine tree, the researchers said in the new study.

"We are not trying to engineer plants with nanotechnology we let plant cells do the nanoengineering," said study co-author Chiara Daraio, a materials scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "Instead of trying to mimic properties found in biological systems, we allow biological systems to fabricate new materials for us, with properties not achievable before in man-made materials."

The carbon nanotubes served as permanent electrically conductive pathways that substituted for water after the cyberwood dehydrated, stabilizing its unique properties even after the plant cells died.

"It is possible to immortalize, in composite materials that combine biological and synthetic elements, properties that are common only in living plants," Daraio told Live Science. [Incredible Tech: How to Engineer Life in the Lab]

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Zombie cyborg wood aids night vision