Category Technology/Electronics

Schematic illustration and charge transfer mechanism of ENHANS ribbons.

Marty McFly’s self-lacing Nikes in Back to the Future Part II inspired a UCF scientist who has developed filaments that harvest and store the sun’s energy—and can be woven into textiles. The breakthrough would essentially turn jackets and other clothing into wearable, solar-powered batteries. It could one day revolutionize wearable technology, helping everyone from soldiers who now carry heavy loads of batteries to a texting-addicted teen who could charge his smartphone by simply slipping it in a pocket. “That movie was the motivation,” A/Professor Jayan Thomas, University of Central Florida’s NanoScience Technology Center, said of the film released 1989...

Electron microscope image of a chromium dioxide devices based on wires. The green wire is the chromium dioxide ferromagnet. The orange wires are superconductors and are necessary to produce a superconducting current through the green wire.

Electrons that spin synchronously around their axis, turn out to stay superconductive across large distances within magnetic chrome dioxide. Electric current from these electrons can flip small magnets, and its superconductive version could form the basis for a hard drive without energy loss...

Most of us know pectin as a key ingredient for making delicious jellies and jams, not as a component for a complex hybrid device that links biological and electronic systems. But a team of Italian scientists have built on previous work using pectin with a high degree of methylation as the medium to create a new architecture of hybrid device with a double-layered polyelectrolyte that alone drives memristive behavior. A memristive device is a synapse analogue, a device that has a memory. Its behavior in a certain moment depends on its previous activity, similar to the way information in the human brain is transmitted from one neuron to another.

“In this research, we applied materials generally used in the pharmaceutical and food industries in our electrochemical devices,” said Angelica Cifa...

New research is paving the way to producing quantum communications networks. (stock image) Credit: © agsandrew / Fotolia

From stationary to flying qubits at speeds never reached before….This feat, achieved by a team from Polytechnique Montréal and France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), brings us a little closer to the era when information is transmitted via quantum principles. The creation of a qubit in zinc selenide, a well-known semi-conductor material, made it possible to produce an interface between quantum physics that governs the behaviour of matter on a nanometre scale and the transfer of information at the speed of light, thereby paving the way to producing quantum communications networks.

In quantum physics, single electrons can take the value of 0, 1 or...