A new electrode that could free up 20% more light from organic light-emitting diodes has been developed at the University of Michigan. It could help extend the battery life of smartphones and laptops, or make next-gen televisions and displays much more energy efficient.

The approach prevents light from being trapped in the light-emitting part of an OLED, enabling OLEDs to maintain brightness while using less power. In addition, the electrode is easy to fit into existing processes for making OLED displays and light fixtures.

“With our approach, you can do it all in the same vacuum chamber,” said L. Jay Guo, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering and corresponding author of the study.

Unless engineers take action, about 80% of the light produced by an OLED gets tr...

New research shows how the fundamental law of conservation of charge could break down near a black hole. Singularities such as those at the centre of black holes, where density becomes infinite, are often said to be places where physics ‘breaks down’. However, this doesn’t mean that ‘anything’ could happen, and physicists are interested in which laws could break down, and how.

Now, a research team from Imperial College London and the Cockcroft Institute and Lancaster University have proposed a way that singularities could violate the law of conservation of charge. Their theory is published in Annalen der Physik.

Co-author Professor Martin McCall, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “‘Physics breaks down at a singularity’ is one of the most famous statements in pop-...

Many people don’t realize that the trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi residing within the gastrointestinal tract — collectively called the gut microbiome — are connected to overall health, and specifically to cancer.

Manipulating the gut microbiome to produce “beneficial” commensal microbes, which protect the host from pathogens and can boost immune responses, among other things, could potentially help patients respond better to cancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy.

To that end, researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new dietary fiber formulation that improves the potency of immunotherapies against cancer by modulating the gut microbiome...

UMD-led team used NASA’s SOFIA telescope to capture high-resolution details of a star nursery in the Milky Way. University of Maryland researchers created the first high-resolution image of an expanding bubble of hot plasma and ionized gas where stars are born...