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Fibers are the building blocks of a broad spectrum of products from textiles to composites, and waveguides to wound dressings. While ubiquitous, the capabilities of fibers have not rapidly increased compared to semiconductor chip technology, for example. Recognizing that fibers lack the composition, geometry, and feature sizes for more functions, we set out years ago to explore the boundaries of fiber functionality. Our approach focused on a particular form of fiber production, thermal-drawing from a preform. This process has been used for producing single material fibers, but by combining metals, insulators, and semiconductors all within a single strand of fiber, an entire world of functionality in fibers has emerged. Fibers with optical, electrical, acoustic, or optoelectronic functionalities can be produced at scale from relatively easy-to-assemble macroscopic preforms. Two significant opportunities now present themselves. First, can we expect that fiber functions escalate in a predictable manner, creating the context for a "Moore's Law" analogue in fibers? Second, as fabrics occupy an enormous surface around our bodies, could fabrics offer valuable service to augment the human body? Towards answering these questions, we detail the materials, performance, and limitations of thermally-drawn fibers in different electronic applications and envision their potential in new fields.

Supercapacitor fibers, with short charging times, long cycle lifespans, and high power densities, hold promise for powering flexible fabric‐based electronics. To date, however, only short lengths of functioning fiber supercapacitors have been produced. The primary goal of this study is to introduce a supercapacitor fiber that addresses the remaining challenges of scalability, flexibility, cladding impermeability, and performance at length. This is achieved through a top‐down fabrication method in which a macroscale preform is thermally drawn into a fully functional energy‐storage fiber. The preform consists of five components: thermally reversible porous electrode and electrolyte gels; conductive polymer and copper microwire current collectors; and an encapsulating hermetic cladding. This process produces 100 m of continuous functional supercapacitor fiber, orders of magnitude longer than any previously reported. In addition to flexibility (5 mm radius of curvature), moisture resistance (100 washing cycles), and strength (68 MPa), these fibers have an energy density of 306 μWh cm−2 at 3.0 V and ≈100% capacitance retention over 13 000 cycles at 1.6 V. To demonstrate the utility of this fiber, it is machine‐woven and used as filament for 3D printing.

Fabrics are on the most valuable real estate in the world-the surface of our bodies. Exposed to troves of data, important health insights would be revealed if only fabrics could compute: sense, store, analyze, infer, alert, and act while retaining their traditional qualities. A fiber-based vision for fabric computing and AI is introduced that can appreciate fabrics into valuable information tracts.

Despite intensive research efforts in the synthesis of binary colloidal crystals, the production of well ordered binary colloidal crystal films over large areas continues to be synthetically challenging. In this paper, we investigate the phase behavior of binary mixtures of l-arginine-stabilized 36 and 22 nm silica nanoparticles deposited as centimeter-scale thin films onto a vertical substrate via evaporative assembly. By adjusting the temperature and relative colloid composition under high humidity conditions, we controlled the order of the resultant colloidal crystal films. The domain size of the AB binary crystalline phase increased with an excess of small (B) particles and a very slow evaporation rate below 45 °C, with the best results obtained at 30° and 35 °C.

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