Prof. Becky Peterson at the University of Michigan leads a team that has developed a scalable, manufacturable method for developing thin film transistors (TFTs) that operate at the lowest possible voltage. This is particularly important for TFT integration with today’s silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS), which are used in the vast majority of integrated circuits.

“We’re essentially developing a less complicated device that operates at lower voltage,” said ECE Ph.D. student Tonglin (Tanya) Newsom, who is first author on the paper...

Earth’s potassium arrived by meteoritic delivery service finds new research led by Carnegie’s Nicole Nie and Da Wang. Their work, published in Science, shows that some primitive meteorites contain a different mix of potassium isotopes than those found in other, more-chemically processed meteorites. These results can help elucidate the processes that shaped our solar system and determined the composition of its planets.

“The extreme conditions found in stellar interiors enable stars to manufacture elements usi...

Fathers exposed to chemicals in plastics can affect the metabolic health of their offspring for two generations, a University of California, Riverside, mouse study reports.

Plastics, which are now ubiquitous, contain endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, that have been linked to increased risk of many chronic diseases; parental exposure to EDCs, for example, has been shown to cause metabolic disorders, including obesity and diabetes, in the offspring.

Most studies have focused on the impact of maternal EDC exposure on the offspring’s health. The current study, published in the journal Environment International, focused on the effects of paternal EDC exposure.

Led by Changcheng Zhou, a professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine, the researchers investigated ...

In recent years, many physicists and computer scientists have been working on the development of quantum computing technologies. These technologies are based on qubits, the basic units of quantum information. In contrast with classical bits, which have a value of 0 or 1, qubits can exist in superposition states, so they can have a value of 0 and 1 simultaneously. Qubits can be made of different physical systems, including electrons, nuclear spins (i.e., the spin state of a nucleus), photons, and superconducting circuits.

Electron s...