Category Technology/Electronics

Over the past few decades, electronics engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated implantable medical devices. Reliably powering some of these devices, however, can be challenging, particularly when they are based on stretchable materials that move along with the body.

Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University and other institutions in South Korea recently developed a new wireless power system that could provide energy to soft implantable devices, even when they are stretching or moving. The new system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was initially used to develop a cardiac pacemaker, a medical device that uses electrical pulses to control heartbeats.

“This wor...

If computer chips could be built from semiconductors just one atom thick, they could pack far more transistors into a smaller space while using lesspower. So far, however, the technology has been held back by the weakness of “p-type” transistors, which make up half of every modern chip.

In a new study published in Nature, researchers led by Vincent Tung at the University of Tokyo have shown that atom-thin sheets of boron carbon nitride (BCN) could offer a promising solution.

Transistor bottleneck
Today’s chips rely on two types of transistors working in pairs. In “n-type” transistors, electric current is carried by negatively charged electrons...

The universe may be trapped in its own comfort zone, and a researcher in the College of Engineering and Computer Science has helped explain why it cannot seem to leave. A new study suggests the universe could be locked into its current state by the same kinds of quantum effects that scientists study when trying to preserve fragile information inside a quantum computer.

The paper, titled “Cosmic Lockdown: When Decoherence Saves the Universe from Tunneling,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

It was written by Gregory Kaplanek, a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Jason Pollack, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, along with four c...

When scientists assess how dangerous a bacterium is, the first question often seems simple: Can it be stopped or killed? In microbiology and antibiotic research, one of the classic readouts has been whether a bacterium can grow in the presence of a given treatment. The bacterium either grows or it does not. The drug either stops it or it does not.

But infection is not just a survival contest...