The woods are lovely, dark, deep, and filled with potential computer components.

In a paper published in Nature Communications this week, researchers announced the construction of computer chips made from wood.

But don't expect to see hipsters advertising hand-carved artisan computer chips. The wood product that the scientists are using is called cellulose nanofibril, or CNF. It is thin, flexible, and when a layer of epoxy is applied, it doesn't expand or attract moisture like wood normally does (think of a warped board--not something you want in a computer). The researchers were able to use CNF as a substrate or base layer for electronic circuits in lab tests, and they hope that their invention will be an eco-friendly solution to a growing electronic waste problem.

Wood is a renewable resource, unlike a lot of the petroleum-based alternatives that manufacturers use to build the bases of modern computer chips. But wood has another advantage: it can degrade.