Category Technology/Electronics

Iron-dotted boron nitride nanotubes, made in Yoke Khin Yaps’ lab at Michigan Tech, could make for better wearable tech because of their flexibility and electronic behaviors. Credit: Michigan Tech, Sue Hill

The road to more versatile wearable technology is dotted with iron. Specifically, quantum dots of iron arranged on boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs). Yap says the iron-studded BNNTs are pushing the boundaries of electronics hardware. The transistors modulating electron flow need an upgrade.

“Look beyond semiconductors,” he says, explaining that materials like silicon semiconductors tend to overheat, can only get so small and leak electric current. The key to revamping the fundamental base of transistors is creating a series of stepping-stones that use quantum tunneling.

The nanotubes are t...

A high-speed camera captured this image of an elastic sphere bouncing off the water surface in a tank. Credit: Chris Mabey

Skipping stones across the water surface can be tricky. So why is it so easy to get such impressive water-skipping performance from an elastic ball? Researchers say they have answers that may reveal a lot about water impact physics – important in naval applications and maritime and ocean engineering.

In collaboration the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in R.I., and Brown University, Assistant Prof Tadd Truscott’s team at USU’s Splash Lab have unraveled the physics of how elastic spheres bounce on water more easily than rigid ones. They uses high-speed cameras to capture images of elastic spheres bouncing across tanks of water in a laboratory...

MIT researchers have designed a new chip to implement neural networks. It is 10 times as efficient as a mobile GPU, so it could enable mobile devices to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms locally, rather than uploading data to the Internet for processing. Credit: MIT News

Advance could enable mobile devices to implement ‘neural networks’ modeled on the human brain. It is 10 times as efficient as a mobile GPU, so it could enable mobile devices to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms locally, rather than uploading data to the Internet for processing.

Neural networks are typically implemented using graphics processing units (GPUs), special-purpose graphics chips found in all computing devices with screens...

The researchers from the Faculty of Physics of the Moscow State University have grown organic crystals that allow creating flexible electronic devices. Credit: Dmitry Yu. Paraschuk et al.

Scientists from Faculty of Physics Moscow State University have grown organic semiconductor crystals which can reduce the cost of the process of creating light, flexible and transparent light-emitting electronic devices of the new generation. It has high light-emitting efficiency that promise a bright future for wet-processed organic optoelectronics. They also made a double breakthrough using much simpler and cheaper technologies that previously were considered impractical.

The organic optoelectronics is a rapidly growing area including organic light-emitting transistors (OLET) and organic lasers pumped b...