Health-related chemicals can be detected on dry skin, according to the National University of Singapore (NUS), which developed a stretchable ‘ionic-electronic bilayer hydrogel’ sensor with the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star). The chemicals are known as solid-state epidermal biomarkers. “These biomarkers, which include cholesterol and lactate, are found in the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of the ...
A team of engineers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst set themselves the task instrumenting cardiac tissue as it is grown outside the body to study heart disease. Artists impression over photo: “Cardiac tissue is very special,” said Jun Yao of UMass Amherst’s college of engineering. “It has a mechanical activity – contractions and relaxations that pump blood through our ...
Red phosphorus is a potential anode material for lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries, but like sodium itself, its positive values are counter-balanced by considerable challenges. Academics in China and Poland have done a detailed systematic review of phosphorus anode research, which has been published for anyone to read. “The development of cost-effective and high-performance red phosphorus anode materials for Li-ion and ...
Implants that push into the surface of the brain to gain electrical access to neurons have to be connected to the outside world somehow. Thin umbilical cables to the scull tend to be the answer. These cables need to be very flexible as the brain is fixed within the skull, but rather ‘floats’ in liquid (cerebrospinal fluid – ‘CSF’) within ...
Next-generation blue OLED materials degrade early mainly due to the loss of oxygen in molecules at the interface between emission and electron transport layers, according to the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, which teamed up with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology to pull OLED junctions apart in minute detail. “The presence of these degradation molecules correlates negatively with the blue ...
Researchers at Chiba University in Japan have uncovered a rule of organic solar cell materials that could guide their development, or at least stop people hunting for the impossible. It is that the exciton binding energy in a material is a quarter of its transport bandgap, regardless of the material. “A previously unpredicted nature of exciton binding energies in organic ...
Tokyo Institute of Technology has demonstrated a blue OLED with a forward voltage of 1.97V at 100cd/m2, and still emitting at lower voltages such as 1.5V (right). “Conventional blue OLEDs typically require around 4V for a luminance of 100cd/m2, this is higher than the industrial target of 3.7 V – the voltage of lithium-ion batteries,” according to the Institute. Its ...
Faced with an empty driving seat, pedestrians trust certain visual prompts when deciding whether to cross in front of an autonomous car, according to the University of Nottingham, which has studied such behaviour on its own campus. The study used a fake autonomous car, with a concealed human driver, equipped with animated display panels on its front that pedestrians could ...
In what might be the lowest power data transmission scheme ever, researchers at the University of Washington have sent data using the Johnson noise of a 50Ω resistor – or more accurately, the difference in Johnson noise between a 50Ω resistor and an open-circuit. One of the prototypes 5bit/s was sent over ~7.3m with a bit error rate of 0.15%, ...
Scientists in Australia have opened the door to self-assembling controllable nano-scale electronic and spintronic devices by discovering how magnetism arises in 2-d ‘kagome’ metal-organic frameworks. Kagome materials have repeating pattern of hexagons and smaller triangles, with the hexagons touching at their tips (images below). The word is Japanese, relating to a basket weaving pattern. In this case, the metal-organic is ...
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