news

Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window) Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Click to print (Opens in new window) UC Berkeley engineers have created a device that dramatically reduces the energy needed to power magnetic field detectors, which could revolutionize how we measure the magnetic fields that flow through our electronics, our planet and even our bodies.

To curb greenhouse gas emissions, nations, states, and cities should aim for a mix of fuel-saving, flexible, and highly reliable sources. In major legislation passed at the end of August, California committed to creating a 100 percent carbon-free electricity grid - once again leading other nations, states, and cities in setting aggressive policies for slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

Leading academics have for the first time, measured Great Britain's hourly local demand for natural gas, providing insights into the gas consumption that helps keep the country warm 1 . Research published today by the UK Energy Research Centre 2 sheds new light on the scale and variability of local gas demand, highlighting the particular challenge of providing energy for heating and hot water throughout the winter.

Using a single pixel camera and Terahertz electromagnetic waves, a team of Physicists at the University of Sussex have devised a blueprint which could lead to the development of airport scanners capable of detecting explosives.

A new form of electronics manufacturing which embeds silicon nanowires into flexible surfaces could lead to radical new forms of bendable electronics, scientists say. In a new paper published today in the journal Microsystems and Nanoengineering, engineers from the University of Glasgow describe how they have for the first time been able to affordably 'print' high-mobility semiconductor nanowires onto flexible surfaces to develop high-performance ultra-thin electronic layers.

Researchers have achieved a breakthrough that could in future be used for precise nanotransistors or - in the distant future - possibly even quantum computers. A material that consists of atoms of a single element, but has completely different properties depending on the atomic arrangement - this may sound strange, but is actually reality with graphene nanoribbons.

By Vera Haberfellner The availability of clean drinking water is not automatic. The 'Energy Aware Systems' working group of EMT is working on an energetically self-sufficient and sustainable water desalination plant. In many parts of the world, there is a shortage of clean drinking water. Climate change is aggravating the situation through more intensive periods of drought and increasingly occurring extreme weather conditions.

Researchers incorporate optoelectronic diodes into fibers and weave them into washable fabrics. cloth that has electronic devices built right into it. Researchers at MIT have now embedded high speed optoelectronic semiconductor devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and diode photodetectors, within fibers that were then woven at Inman Mills, in South Carolina, into soft, washable fabrics and made into communication systems.

Silicon-based system offers smaller, cheaper alternative to other "broadband" filters; could improve a variety of photonic devices. MIT researchers have designed an optical filter on a chip that can process optical signals from across an extremely wide spectrum of light at once, something never before available to integrated optics systems that process data using light.

Stanford medical student Kevin Cyr is part of a team of researchers using 3D printing to build custom cardiac surgical devices. Second-year medical student Kevin Cyr is part of a team of Stanford researchers investigating new ways to survey electricity in the heart. The research has led to the development of cardiac surgical devices that could one day help patients who suffer from a common heart ailment.

Researchers at MIT have created what may be the smallest robots yet that can sense their environment, store data, and even carry out computational tasks. These devices, which are about the size of a human egg cell, consist of tiny electronic circuits made of two-dimensional materials, piggybacking on minuscule particles called colloids.

Inleiding: Mystifying results in excitonic Coulomb drag experiments obtained independently by two research groups in the USA explained by the CMT group (M. Zarenia, D. Neilson and F. Peeters) in a recent Physical Review Letters paper. Taking a multiband approach explains 'electron-hole reverse drag' and exciton formation Mystifying experimental results obtained independently by two research groups in the USA seemed to show coupled holes and electrons moving in the opposite direction to theory.

A new type of flow battery that involves a liquid metal more than doubled the maximum voltage of conventional flow batteries and could lead to affordable storage of renewable power. A new combination of materials developed by Stanford researchers may aid in developing a rechargeable battery able to store the large amounts of renewable power created through wind or solar sources.

Summer is the high season for thunderstorms and their resulting lightning and hail storms. TU Graz researchers Stephan Pack and Helmut Paulitsch get to the bottom of this summer phenomenon in their research work. No sooner has the temperature gone up, than the probability of thunderstorms increases.

Electrical and medical engineering researchers create device that makes it easier to measure pressure inside the eyes of people at risk for glaucoma. Researchers at Caltech have developed an implantable pressure sensor that can reside in the human eye for years at a time while wirelessly sending data about the eye's health to the patient or medical professionals.

SLAC and Stanford researchers are developing a device that combines electrical brain stimulation with EEG recording, opening potential new paths for treating neurological disorders. A device under development at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University could help bring back lost brain function by measuring how the brain responds to therapies that stimulate it with electric current.

Research news A team headed by the TUM physicists Alexander Holleitner and Reinhard Kienberger has succeeded for the first time in generating ultrashort electric pulses on a chip using metal antennas only a few nanometers in size, then running the signals a few millimeters above the surface and reading them in again a controlled manner.

Thanks to an unorthodox approach being proposed by EPFL researchers, patients may soon be able to track their illness simply by drinking a solution containing millions of tiny electronic sensors disguised as bacteria. Imagine being able to track the development of diseased cells in real time, simply by having patients drink a glass of water containing millions of tiny electronic biosensors.

After a nearly twenty-year long game of cosmic hide-and-seek, astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory have finally found evidence of hot, diffuse gas permeating the cosmos, closing a puzzling gap in the overall budget of 'normal' matter in the Universe. While the mysterious dark matter and dark energy make up about 25 and 70 percent of our cosmos respectively, the ordinary matter that makes up everything we see - from stars and galaxies to planets and people - amounts to only about five percent.

For the past 10 years, a family of materials called metal-halide perovskites, which can efficiently convert sunlight to electricity, has been shaking up solar cell research. Unlike traditional silicon solar cells, perovskites do not need to be manufactured under high temperature and with high purity, making them comparatively cheaper and easier to work with.