Category Technology/Electronics

Long-standing concerns about portable electronics include the devices’ short battery life and their contribution to e-waste. One group of scientists is now working on a way to address both of these concerns with the development of a biodegradable nanogenerator made with DNA that can harvest the energy from everyday motion and turn it into electrical power.

The movements we often take for granted – such as walking and tapping on our keyboards – release energy that largely dissipates, unused. Several years ago, scientists figured out how to capture some of that energy and convert it into electricity so we might one day use it to power our mobile gadgetry. Achieving this would not only untether us from wall outlets, but it would also reduce our demand on fossil-fuel-based power sources...

The Next Generation Wearable Display Using Fiber Based Light Emitting Diodes. Credit: Copyright KAIST

Professor Kyung-Cheol Choi and his team from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST have developed fiber-like LED’s, which can be applied in wearable displays. Traditional wearable displays were manufactured on a hard substrate, which is later attached to the surface of clothes. Such technique has posed limitations in applying it for wearable displays because inflexible displays were not adequate in practice, and the characteristics of fabric were ignored.

Dip-Coating Process to Create Fiber-Based Light-Emitting Diodes

Solution? They focused on fibers, a component of fabrics, and developed a fiber-like light emitting diode that has the characteristics of both fabrics and displays...

Nanoparticles in the shape of cubes, octahedrons, and spheres coordinate with each other to build structures. The shapes are bound together by complementary DNA molecules on each type of particle. The structures of the resulting 3D crystals are determined by the spatial symmetry of the facets of the cubes and octahedrons, while their structural order depends on DNA-tuned interactions and the ratio of the nanoparticles’ sizes.

APPS: Directional binding for self-assembling materials made of different types of nanoparticles opens up opportunities to design unique materials that could benefit high-density energy storage devices and catalysis, among other applications.

The organization of spherical particles into lattices is typically driven by packing considerations...

A schematic shows the layered structure of tantalum oxide, multilayer graphene and platinum used for a new type of memory developed at Rice University. The memory device overcomes crosstalk problems that cause read errors in other devices. Credit: Tour Group/Rice University

The memories are based on tantalum oxide, a common insulator in electronics. Applying voltage to a 250-nm-thick sandwich of graphene, tantalum, nanoporous tantalum oxide and platinum creates addressable bits where the layers meet. Control voltages that shift oxygen ions and vacancies switch the bits between ones and zeroes.

The discovery by Rice lab chemist James Tour could allow for crossbar array memories that store up to 162 gigabits, much higher than other oxide-based memory systems...