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What if your clothes could play music? What if your clothes could act as a guitar? If you’re interested in both the two ideas, you must thank MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics. During the past decade, the lab has been working hard to develop fibers so that they can interact with the environment, and in the August issue of Nature Materials, the lab announced a new kind of fibers that can detect and produce sound. The heart of the acoustic fibers is a plastic used in microphones, and it can change shapes when an electric field is applied to it. So it’s not a fantasy to apply these fibers into clothes, though we may still have to wait for years to see the real acoustic coats and shirts in the store.

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