In the not-so-far-off future, protecting yourself against identity theft -- or, just plain theft -- could be as easy as pressing a button. Then, if your stolen credit card or cell phone are made with the kind of cutting-edge materials researchers at Iowa State are developing, your purloined items would simply disintegrate on command.

It's a new way of looking at electronics, asserts Reza Montazami, an Iowa State University assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

"The resistors, capacitors and electronics, you don't expect everything to dissolve in such a manner that there's no trace of it," Montazami said in a university news release. "You don't expect your cell phone to dissolve someday, right?"

But that's exactly the kind of self-destructing personal device Montazami foresees will become the industry standard, as soon as he and his engineering colleagues are able to develop the necessary materials.

Then, Montazami predicts, a medical gadget, once its job is done, could harmlessly melt away inside a person's body, a military device could collect and send its data about some vital secret behind enemy lines and then dissolve away, or, a robotic probe could be sent out into a pristine environment to collect climate information, and then simply wash away in the rain.

Montazami is convinced the future lies in what he calls "transient materials" or "transient electronics," unique polymers designed to quickly and completely melt away when activated.

To that end, his research group is developing degradable polymer composite materials able to house electronic components; it's already built and tested a degradable antenna capable of data transmission.

The team presented some of its research results at the latest meeting of the American Chemical Society in Dallas.

To demonstrate that potential, Montazami played a video for attending the presentation that showed a blue light-emitting diode mounted on a clear polymer composite base with the electrical leads embedded inside. After one drop of water was applied to the set-up, the base and wiring begin to melt away and, soon thereafter, the light went out. A second drop of water degraded then few particles that were left.

The approach and at least some of Montazami's findings are more fully detailed in the paper "Study of Physically Transient Insulating Materials as a Potential Platform for Transient Electronics and Bioelectronics," which was recently published online by the journal Advanced Functional Materials and for which Montazami served as senior author.

"Investigation of electronic devices based on transient materials (transient electronics) is a new and rarely addressed technology with paramount potentials in both medical and military applications," the researchers wrote in the paper.

If fact, the research team have developed and tested several transient resistors and capacitors and they're currently working on transient LED and transistor technology, said Montazami, who started the research as a way to connect his background in solid-state physics and materials science with applied work in mechanical engineering -- and now sees an array of potential commercial applications as the technology advances.