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Swiss scientists have created a minor sensation in synthetic chemistry. The team of scientists from ETH Zurich and Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, succeeded for the first time in producing regularly ordered planar polymers that form a kind of “molecular carpet” on a nanometer scale. Back in 1920 at ETH [...]
It’s the year’s hottest initial public offering, but some wealth managers find themselves having a hard time recommending Facebook to their clients. The world’s biggest social network is expected to seek a $75 billion to $100 billion valuation in its IPO, the most anticipated stock offering from Silicon Valley since Google Inc went public in [...]
When saints become sinners we all breathe more easily, because we all realize the distance between them and us is not so great. Many will feel their lungs expand, therefore, on hearing that the New England Patriots’ quarterback and all-around perfect human being watched last year’s Super Bowl illegally on his laptop. You might think [...]
One of the challenges facing many scientists in lesser-known fields is communicating what it is they work on. A contest aims to advance scientific research–while demystifying it for the general public–through visualizations. The National Science Foundation and the journal Science announced the winners of the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge on Friday. “These winnerscommunicate science in a manner [...]
Engineers have built the first carbon nanotube (CNT) transistor with a channel length below 10 nm, a size that is considered a requirement for computing technology in the next decade. Not only can the tiny transistor sufficiently control current, it does so significantly better than predicted by theory. It even outperforms the best competing silicon [...]
In a paper published this week in Science, a Manchester team lead by Nobel laureates Professor Andre Geim and Professor Konstantin Novoselov has literally opened a third dimension in graphene research. Their research shows a transistor that may prove the missing link for graphene to become the next silicon. Graphene – one atomic plane of carbon [...]
Within a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels, at low cost, using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material. That’s the vision of MIT researcher Andreas Mershin, whose work appears this week in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. The work is an extension of [...]
One day in 2010, Rutgers physicist Vitaly Podzorov watched a store employee showcase a kitchen gadget that vacuum-seals food in plastic. The demo stuck with him. The simple concept — an airtight seal around pieces of food — just might apply to his research: developing flexible electronics using lightweight organic semiconductors for products such as [...]
Polymer nano-films and nano-composites are used in a wide variety of applications from food packaging to sports equipment to automotive and aerospace applications. Thermal analysis is routinely used to analyze materials for these applications, but the growing trend to use nanostructured materials has made bulk techniques insufficient. In recent years an atomic force microscope-based technique [...]
KU Leuven researcher Ventsislav Valev and an international team of scientists have developed a new method for optical manipulation of matter at the nanoscale. Using ‘plasmonic hotspots’ — regions with electric current that heat up very locally — gold nanostructures can be melted and made to produce the smallest nanojets ever observed. The tiny gold [...]