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.
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.
(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.
Flexible, transparent electronics are closer to reality with the creation of graphene-based electrodes. Researchers have created thin films that could revolutionize touch-screen displays, solar panels and LED lighting.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Electrical engineers at the University of Michigan have built a device that can harness energy from vibrations and convert it to electricity with five to ten times greater efficiency and power than other devices in its class. And it
After six years of intensive effort, scientists are reporting development of the first commercially viable nanogenerator, a flexible chip that can use body movements — a finger pinch now en route to a pulse beat in the future — to generate electricity. Speaking here today at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, they described boosting the device
A breakthrough in producing light emitting diodes could bring LED production costs down as much as 75.
