It's impressive to see how thin some laptops have become these days, but that's nothing compared to the ultra-thin machines of the future – which may be closer to reality thanks to a new chip production breakthrough from MIT.
If we've learned one thing from breathy concept designs and cheesy sci-fi movies, it's that we all deserve flexible technologies: bio-electric tattoos that measure our vitals and tablets we can roll up to shove in our pockets.
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show isn’t officially over until the end of the day on Saturday but all of the big announcements are behind us at this point.
Magnetic sensors are in everything from home appliances to car-counters at the drive-through. A new technology promises to make them cheaper and smaller.
New research uncovers an unusual form of matter - not a conventional metal, insulator, or magnet, for example, but something entirely different.
Researchers have announced breakthroughs in the development of tunneling field effect transistors, a semiconductor technology that takes advantage of the quirky behavior of electrons at the quantum level.
In the continual quest for better thermoelectric materials -- which convert heat into electricity and vice versa -- researchers have identified a liquid-like compound whose properties give it the potential to be even more efficient than traditional thermoelectrics.
Scientists have provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film. These results also show how such organic films can be chemically modified to improve conductance for superior organic electronics.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Oxford University spinoff company, Oxford Nonopore has announced at this year’s Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference in Florida, two new machines for sequencing genes. Of particular note is the MinION, a machine small enough to fit in the hand which can be plugged into a laptop’s USB port. The other, the GridION, is a larger version that can be stacked to increase processing power. Both rely on a technology known as strand sequencing whereby a nanopore (engineered protein) is used to pull strands of DNA through a hole where a microchip measures minute changes in the electrical current in the membrane around it as individual bases, or pairs are pulled through. Because of the way it is done, much longer sections of DNA can be examined at once, doing away with the need to examine small sections independently and then knitting the results together with a computer afterwards.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light.
Scientists have achieved a significant breakthrough in the performance of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells. They have achieved and demonstrated a record voltage for organic photovoltaic cells that means these highly flexible, low cost solar cells can now be devolved for commercial uses in a wide range of consumer electronics.
Scientists at the Center for Nanotechnology at NASA Ames Research Center have developed a new flexible memory fabric woven together from interlocking
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have reached a crucial milestone that could lead to a new class of materials with useful electronic properties. In research reported in the Sept. 5 issue of Nature Physics, the team sandwiched two nonmagnetic insulators together and discovered a startling result: The layer where the two materials meet has both magnetic and superconducting regions – two properties that normally can’t co-exist.
Researchers in the UK and Italy have discovered a technique to
The ultrathin device can stick to skin like a temporary tattoo and is powerful enough to read brain signals.
