Information Technologies
New options for transparent contact electrodes
January 29, 2013 10:29 am | News | CommentsFound in flat screens, solar modules, or in new organic light-emitting diode (LED) displays, transparent electrodes have become ubiquitous. But since raw materials like indium are becoming more and more costly, researchers have begun to look elsewhere for alternatives. A new review article sheds some light on the different advantages and disadvantages of established and new materials for use in these kinds of contact electrodes.
Nanophotonics technology enables a new kind of optical spectrometer
January 29, 2013 8:15 am | News | CommentsBy bringing nanophotonics technology to traditional optical spectroscopy, a new kind of optical spectrometer with functions of sensing and spectral measurement has been recently demonstrated by a research team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
New device electrically steers and focuses terahertz waves
January 29, 2013 7:53 am | News | CommentsResearchers in Japan and Germany have recently demonstrated a device that can focus and steer terahertz beams electrically. Based on an array of metal cantilevers which can be micromechanically actuated by electrostatic forces, the device can create tunable gratings that may be crucial in future terahertz wavelength communication systems.
DARPA funds research for electronics that disappear
January 28, 2013 5:23 pm | News | CommentsAdvanced electronics are indispensable in modern warfare, but locating and tracking them all on the field of battle is almost impossible. To prevent valuable and strategic technology from falling into enemy hands, DARPA has announced the Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program, which has the aim of improving “transient” electronics, or electronics capable of dissolving into the environment around them.
Poor sleep in old age prevents the brain from storing memories
January 28, 2013 5:06 pm | by Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley | News | CommentsThe connection between poor sleep, memory loss and brain deterioration as we grow older has been elusive. But for the first time, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a link between these hallmark maladies of old age. Their discovery opens the door to boosting the quality of sleep in elderly people to improve memory.
Simulating more efficient solar cells
January 28, 2013 1:50 pm | News | CommentsUsing an exotic form of silicon could substantially improve the efficiency of solar cells, according to computer simulations by researchers at the University of California, Davis and in Hungary. Solar cells are based on the photoelectric effect: A photon, or particle of light, hits a silicon crystal and generates a negatively charged electron and a positively charged hole. Collecting those electron-hole pairs generates electric current. Conventional solar cells generate one electron-hole pair per incoming photon, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency of 33%. One exciting new route to improved efficiency is to generate more than one electron-hole pair per photon.
Researchers break million-core supercomputer barrier
January 28, 2013 10:18 am | by Andrew Myers, Stanford University | News | CommentsStanford Engineering's Center for Turbulence Research has set a new record in computational science by successfully using a supercomputer with more than one million computing cores to solve a complex fluid dynamics problem—the prediction of noise generated by a supersonic jet engine.
Study: Distant rural areas may feel cities' heat
January 28, 2013 8:33 am | by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer | News | CommentsHeat rising up from cities such as New York, Paris and Tokyo might be remotely warming up winters far away in some rural parts of Alaska, Canada, and Siberia, a new study theorizes. In an unusual twist revealed by computer modeling, that same urban heat from buildings and cars may be slightly cooling the autumns in much of the Western United States, Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean. The finding stems from the ability of “heat island” energy to change high-altitude currents.
EU science projects win up to billion euros each
January 28, 2013 8:16 am | News | CommentsTwo science projects—one to map the human brain, the other to explore the extraordinary properties of the carbon-based material graphene—were declared the winners Monday of an EU technologies contest and will receive up to €1 billion ($1.35 billion) each over the next 10 years.
Technique points toward 2D devices
January 28, 2013 7:59 am | News | CommentsRice University scientists have taken an important step toward the creation of 2D electronics with a process to make patterns in atom-thick layers that combine a conductor and an insulator. The materials at play—graphene and hexagonal boron nitride—have been merged into sheets and built into a variety of patterns at nanoscale dimensions.
Maglev tissues could speed toxicity tests
January 25, 2013 7:55 am | News | CommentsIn a development that could lead to faster and more effective toxicity tests for airborne chemicals, scientists from Rice University and the Rice spinoff company Nano3D Biosciences have used magnetic levitation to grow some of the most realistic lung tissue ever produced in a laboratory.
Organic ferroelectric molecule shows promise for memory chips
January 24, 2013 2:31 pm | News | CommentsAt the heart of computing are tiny crystals that transmit and store digital information's ones and zeroes. Today these are hard and brittle materials. But cheap, flexible, nontoxic organic molecules may play a role in the future of hardware. A team led by the University of Washington and the Southeast University discovered a molecule that shows promise as an organic alternative to today's silicon-based semiconductors.
Computer scientists develop new way to study molecular networks
January 24, 2013 2:15 pm | News | CommentsComputer scientists at Virginia Tech developed a new approach to address the shortcomings in the computational analysis of the multiple ways interactions can occur within cells. Their work may lead to further understanding of the interactions between molecules.
Study: Digital information can be stored in DNA
January 24, 2013 11:42 am | by Malcolm Ritter, AP Science Writer | News | CommentsUsing genetic material as their medium, researchers reported Wednesday that they had stored all 154 Shakespeare sonnets, a photo, a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. That all fit in a barely visible bit of DNA in a test tube.
Sensors from a spray can: Organic materials increase camera sensitivity
January 23, 2013 5:41 pm | News | CommentsResearchers in Germany have developed a new generation of image sensors that are more sensitive to light than the conventional silicon versions. Simple and cheap to produce, they consist of electrically conductive plastics which are sprayed onto the sensor surface in an ultra-thin layer. The chemical composition of the polymer spray coating can be altered so that even the invisible range of the light spectrum can be captured.
Storing data in individual molecules
January 23, 2013 3:41 pm | by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office | News | CommentsAn experimental technology called molecular memory, which would store data in individual molecules, promises another 1,000-fold increase in storage density. But previous schemes for molecular memory have relied on physical systems cooled to near absolute zero. An international team of researchers describes a new molecular-memory scheme that works at around the freezing point of water—which in physics parlance counts as "room temperature."
Self-assembling silica microwires may enable integrated optical devices
January 23, 2013 10:23 am | News | CommentsSilica microwires are the tiny and as-yet underutilized cousins of optical fibers. If precisely manufactured, however, these hair-like slivers of silica could enable applications and technology not currently possible with comparatively bulky optical fiber. By carefully controlling the shape of water droplets with an ultraviolet laser, a team of researchers from Australia and France has found a way to coax silica nanoparticles to self-assemble into much more highly uniform silica wires.
Novel gene-searching software improves accuracy in disease studies
January 23, 2013 8:43 am | News | CommentsA new software tool, developed at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, streamlines the detection of disease-causing genetic changes through more sensitive detection methods and by automatically correcting for variations that reduce the accuracy of results in conventional software. The software, called ParseCNV, is freely available to the scientific-academic community.
Report: Cuba using undersea fiber-optic cable
January 21, 2013 2:15 pm | by PETER ORSI - Associated Press - Associated Press | News | CommentsCuba apparently has finally switched on the first undersea fiber-optic cable linking it to the outside world nearly two years after its arrival, according to analysis by a company that monitors global Internet use. In a report posted Sunday on the website of Renesys, author Doug Madory wrote that Cuba began using the ALBA-1 cable on Jan. 14.
Martian crater may once have held groundwater-fed lake
January 21, 2013 11:46 am | News | CommentsNew information coming from researchers analyzing spectrometer data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which looked down on the floor of McLaughlin Crater on the Red Planet’s surface, suggests the formation of the carbonates and clay in a groundwater-fed lake within the closed basin of the crater. The depth of the crater may have helped allow the lake to form.
Researchers keep electronic devices cool with nanotechnology
January 21, 2013 10:57 am | News | CommentsA team of scientists have designed and fabricated ultrasmall devices for energy-efficient electronics. By finding out how molecules behave in these devices, a ten-fold increase in switching efficiency was obtained by changing just one carbon atom. These devices could provide new ways to combat overheating in mobile phones and laptops, and could also aid in electrical stimulation of tissue repair for wound healing.
“Quadruple helix” DNA structure proven to exist in human cells
January 21, 2013 8:53 am | News | CommentsMarking the culmination of over 10 years of investigation by scientists to show—in vivo—that complex four-stranded structures exist in the human genome alongside Watson and Crick’s famous double helix, researchers in the U.K. have recently published a paper that goes on to show clear links between concentrations of four-stranded quadruplexes and the process of DNA replication, which is pivotal to cell division and production.
Multiple steps toward the “quantum singularity”
January 18, 2013 7:41 am | by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office | News | CommentsIn early 2011, a pair of theoretical computer scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed an optical experiment that would harness the weird laws of quantum mechanics to perform a computation impossible on conventional computers. The experiment involves generating individual photons—particles of light—and synchronizing their passage through a maze of optical components so that they reach a battery of photon detectors at the same time.
Webb Telescope teams completes optics milestone
January 17, 2013 10:27 am | News | CommentsEngineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have recently concluded performance testing on the observatory's aft-optics subsystem at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp's facilities in Boulder, Colo. This is significant because it means all of the telescope's mirror systems are ready for integration and testing.
Scientists examine impact of functionalized MRI
January 17, 2013 10:07 am | News | CommentsThe development of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—a tool used to gauge real-time brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow—has given researchers the opportunity to try to answer various questions about the brain and mind. But some are not convinced of its usefulness, and a new report published by Association for Psychological Science takes stock of what fMRI has actually accomplished.
