Category Technology/Electronics

Renewable device could help mitigate climate change, power medical devices. Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine.

As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an “Air-gen.” or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter...

A new material has properties that make it a promising candidate for new areas like magnetic twistronic devices and spintronics, as well as advances in data storage and device design.

All the elements are there to begin with, so to speak; it’s just a matter of figuring out what they are capable of – alone or together. For Leslie Schoop’s lab, one recent such investigation has uncovered a layered compound with a trio of properties not previously known to exist in one material.

With an international interdisciplinary team, Schoop, assistant professor of chemistry, and Postdoctoral Research Associate Shiming Lei, published a paper last week in Scien...

A new study reveals good news for the possibility of using perovskite materials in next-generation solar cells. The study, published in the journal Acta Materialia, finds that though perovskite films tend to crack easily, those cracks are easily healed with some compression or a little bit of heat. That bodes well, the researchers say, for the use of inexpensive perovskites to replace or complement pricy silicon in solar cell technologies.

“The efficiency of perovskite solar cells has grown very quickly and now rivals silicon in laboratory cells,” said Nitin Padture, the Otis E...

Magnetic memory device is smallest demonstrated and uses record-low current. Memory-hungry, power-sapping big data might finally have met its match.

Electrical engineers at Northwestern University and the University of Messina in Italy have developed a new magnetic memory device that could potentially support the surge of data-centric computing, which requires ever-increasing power, storage and speed.

Based on antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials, the device is the smallest of its kind ever demonstrated and operates with record-low electrical current to write data.

“The rise of big data has enabled the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI)...