Glow worms

Nature can be truly wonderful. A recent paper in Nature Nanotechnology might have the potential to replace epitaxy with worm excrement. The team at King’s College London put cadmium chloride and sodium tellurite in the soil eaten by standard, wild earthworms. Amazingly through processes in their guts the worms created nanometre diameter-sized luminescence dots of cadmium telluride. Worms excreting quantum dots could be both a whole new approach to making semiconductors. Probably not a good idea to try to up-scale this technique with research students.