What’s the News: If two South Korean researchers have their way, the days of needing specialized equipment to test whether someone has strep, the flu, or other common illnesses may soon be numbered. The pair want to check for disease markers in a tiny drop of a bodily fluid by pressing it against a touchscreen, so your diagnosis could come straight from your smart phone. While there’s no app for that yet, the scientists recently finished a proof-of-concept study showing that a touchscreen could differentiate between various concentrations of bacterial DNA—a first step towards diagnosing your disease by spitting on your iPad.

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What’s the News: Metamaterials could improve wireless power transfer, letting us one day charge our devices without the hassle of cords and wires, says a study published last week in Physical Review B. While wireless power transfer already works to for tiny amounts of energy, metamaterials could theoretically be used to safely and efficiently boost the technique to handle more power, such as microwaves and lasers.

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What’s the News: The foundation of modern electronics, silicon transistors are miniature on/off switches that regulate electric current. This week, Intel demonstrated a new transistor design that’s being hailed by Intel as one of the most radical developments in transistors since the advent of integrated circuits of the 1950s. By adding tiny, vertical fins to normally flat transistors, Intel’s new Tri-Gate transistor allows for faster, smaller, and lower-voltage computer chips. “We’ve been talking about these 3-D circuits for more than 10 years, but no one has had the confidence to move them into manufacturing,” chip-manufacturing specialist Dan Hutcheson told The Wall Street Journal. (more…)

What’s the News: Scientists have discovered a new technique for linking semiconducting tubes with mouse nerve cell tendrils: They let the cells do the work for them. After creating biologically friendly semiconductor tubes, they found that nerve cells’ tendril-like axons didn’t shy away. “They seem to like the tubes,” University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineer Justin Williams told Science News. This represents a step toward new technology involving computer-brain networks.

How the Heck: The trick was to create tubes of layered germanium and silicone (which insulate the nerve’s electrical signals) that were big enough for the nerve cell’s threadlike projections to enter but too small for the cell body: When seeded with live mouse nerve cells, the only way the cells could interact with the tubes was be sending tendrils into it—which is just what they did.

What’s the Context:

• This research builds upon some work done in previous studies, where researchers actively connected nerves to semiconductors.
• Science Not Fiction and 80beats have covered other methods of connecting neurons and electronics.
• Which shouldn’t be confused with the development of a brain-like chip. Or the debate over whether random data can become conscious.

Not So Fast: The researchers don’t yet know whether the connected nerves are actually talking with each other.

Next Up: Now they want to hook the tubes to voltage sensors that can “listen” to the cells communicating with each other. If successful, this could lead to new drug tests where doctors can actually measure how nerve cells respond to certain types of drugs, leading to further innovations in the battle against neurological diseases like Parkinson’s.

Image: Minrui Yu, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Reference: “Semiconductor Nanomembrane Tubes: Three-Dimensional Confinement for Controlled Neurite Outgrowth”  Minrui Yu et al. DOI: 10.1021/nn103618d

When experts talk about discarding today’s silicon-based computer chips and building next-generation electronics out of new materials, they’re usually talking about graphene, and for good reason–the one-atom-thick layers of carbon can behave like semiconductors and have already been used in experimental transistors. But researchers from a Swiss lab think they have a material that can trump both silicon and graphene. World, meet molybdenite.

The researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) note that the mineral looks similar to mica, and has a layered molecular structure that allows it to sheer off easily into thin sheets.

Molybdenite, the researchers said, is abundant in nature and is currently used in steel alloys and in lubricants, but it has not previously been studied for use in electronics. “It’s a two-dimensional material, very thin and easy to use in nanotechnology. It has real potential in the fabrication of very small transistors, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and solar cells,” said EPFL Professor Andras Kis, adding that molybdenite (MoS2) is far more compact than silicon, while still allowing electrons to circulate freely. [PC Pro]

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The Story of Electronics has made its debut today (teaser above), following the form of the original Story of Stuff video in 2007. The Story of Stuff, written and narrated by Annie Leonard, created waves of discussion about the environment and consumption in classrooms, homes, and workplaces around the country.

She [created the movie], she said, after tiring of traveling often to present her views at philanthropic and environmental conferences. She attributes the response to the video’s simplicity. “A lot of what’s in the film was already out there,” Ms. Leonard said, “but the style of the animation makes it easy to watch. It is a nice counterbalance to the starkness of the facts.” [New York Times]

The new electronics chapter takes a step beyond the original video’s take on the manufacturing process and consumerism to explain the concept of planned obsolescence, the idea that our electronics are being “designed for the dump”–that is, to be cheaply replaceable as quickly as possible. The video makes a point that these cheap electronics come with hidden costs–to factory workers, people in unsafe electronics recycling facilities, and to the environment.

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In an exciting pilot study, blind people equipped with microchips in their retinas were able to see again–at least dimly–and were able to make out shapes.

Ed Yong explains how the experiment helped a study participant named Miikka:

In people like Miikka with retinitis pigmentosa, the light-detecting cells of the retina break down with age. Eberhart Zrenner and a team of German scientists have designed a chip that does the same job as these defunct cells. Just a few millimetres across, it contains 1,500 light-detecting diodes that detect light and convert it into a current. The brighter the light that hits the chip, the stronger the current it puts out. The current is delivered directly to the bipolar cells, which would normally transmit the signals from the retina’s actual light detectors.

Find out more about how the technology works and get the full story on Miikka and his fellow experiment subjects at Not Exactly Rocket Science. And check out the videos of Miikka trying out his new eyes below.

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Flexible materials technology may just bring the next wave of trendy to the markets, in the form of glowing tattoos and T- shirts. Or the hot new tech could be used for its intended purpose: monitoring medical conditions.

This flexible light-emitting diode (LED) array uses many already existing materials and techniques to create a nano-sized, flexible patch of light. A team lead by John Rogers developed the array as a medical device; it could be implanted to serve as a readout for monitoring internal body conditions, like blood oxygenation or glucose levels, or it could turn on light-activated drugs.

“The applications we’re interested in mostly include interfaces with the human body,” says John Rogers…. For some biological applications, he adds, a conventional LED’s brightness, reliable operation and suitability for waterproof implementation make it a more attractive option than an organic LED. [Scientific American].

Each individual LED is a square that measures 2.5 micrometers thick (smaller than the diameter of  your cells’ nucleus) and 100 micrometers on each side (the thickness of a coat of paint). Many of these LEDs can be printed together to form an array of light points connected by swirls of connective wire that give it additional flexibility. The substrate is flexible enough that it can be stretched and flexed up to 75 percent without losing function. The researchers described the technology in the journal Nature Materials.

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From “When the Robots Sing ‘Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch-Me,’ the E-Skin Is Working,” on the DISCOVER blog Science Not Fiction:

That’s right, e-skin. A group of scientists at UC-Berkeley devised a flexible mesh using nanowires to create a substance that reacts to pressure, and, as their paper in Nature Materials said, “effectively functions as an artificial electronic skin.” In the same issue, a team from Stanford University announced it had devised a kind of skin so sensitive, it can detect the weight of a bluebottle fly.  All of which means for one shining issue, a scientific journal was a skin mag.

Read the rest of this post (with video).

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Image: UC Berkeley

This week computer manufacturer HP announced it is teaming up with chip-maker Hynix to bring the first memristors, or memory resistors, to market within three years. Able to store information even without a source of power, memristors have been hailed as a way to keep up with Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law is that old adage, first uttered by Intel’s Gordon Moore in the 1960s, that the number of transistors one could fit on an integrated circuit should double every couple years or so.

But industry consensus had shifted in recent years to a widespread belief that the end of physical progress in shrinking the size modern semiconductors was imminent. Chip makers are now confronted by such severe physical and financial challenges that they are spending $4 billion or more for each new advanced chip-making factory. [The New York Times]

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The structure of Aleksandr Noy’s new transistor is unimpressively simple: just a carbon nanotube connecting two metal electrodes. But what makes it special is what he and his team use to control it: adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the fuel from our own cells. The project, published in a study in Nano Letters, achieves a key step in unifying man and machine.

The way it works: An insulator coats the ends of the nanotube, but not the middle—it’s left exposed.

The entire device is then coated again, this time with a lipid bi-layer similar to those that form the membranes surrounding our body’s cells [New Scientist].

Finally, the team poured a solution of ATP plus potassium and sodium across the transistor. That created an electric current, one that was stronger the more ATP they poured.

The magic is in the lipid bi-layer, which contains an ATP-sensitive protein that serves as a kind of ion pump when ATP is present. The lipid hydrolyses ATP molecules, with each occurence causing three sodium ions to move one way through the lipid and two potassium ions to move the other way, netting one charge across the bi-layer to the nanotube [Popular Science].

Noy claims to have created “the first example of a truly integrated bioelectronic system,” New Scientist says. And as simple as the transistor is, the idea behind it—harnessing the energy already in our bodies to power electronics—will be one of the keys to creating battery-free devices that monitor our cells, connect to our brains, or do things we won’t think of until we’ve (finally!) got nanodevices hooked up to our brains.

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Image: Aleksandr Noy et. al.

Imagine a day in the future when you can charge your cell phone using your sneakers, or charge a touch-screen device merely by rolling up the flexible screen. New devices that take advantage of the piezoelectric effect–the tendency of some materials to generate an electrical potential when they’re mechanically stressed–are taking us one step closer to that reality.

Ville Kaajakari of the Louisiana Tech University harnessed this effect by developing a tiny generator that can be embedded in a shoe sole. The tiny smart device is part of “MEMS” or “micro electro mechanical systems,” which combine computer chips with micro-components to generate electricity [EarthTechling]. Each time the sneaker-wearer goes for a stroll, the compression action would power up the circuits in the generator and produce tiny bits of usable voltage. “This technology could benefit, for example, hikers that need emergency location devices or beacons,” said Kaajakari. “For more general use, you can use it to power portable devices without wasteful batteries” [Clean Technica].

For now, the amount of energy produced is very small, but the generator could theoretically be used to power sensors, GPS units or portable devices that don’t require a large amount of energy [Clean Technica]. The scientist hopes that the technology can be developed further to charge common devices like mobile phones.

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“Memristors” are four decades in the making, but it turns out that this fourth kind of circuit element (beyond the inductor, capacitor, and resistor) might have more potential to change computing than even its creators first believed.

In a study this week in Nature, researchers with Hewlett-Packard report that they’ve achieved “stateful logic” with their memristor, whose name derives from a mashup of “memory” and “resistor.” In a nutshell, stateful logic means that the ‘state’ of the memristor acts as both the computer and the memory. That’s a pretty big change from current computers, which typically load data from memory, perform operations on it, and then send it back [Nature]. In addition, memristors can store information even in the absence of electrical current.

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Carbon nanotubes have shown the potential to help us take better x-ray images, make cheaper hydrogen fuel cells, and replace silicon in computer chips. Add another possibility onto the pile: MIT researchers report this week in Nature Materials that they’ve used carbon nanotubes to create thermopower waves, a system they say could put out 100 times more energy than a lithium-ion battery.

Michael Strano’s team coated the tubes, which are only billionths of a meter across, with a fuel. This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse [Environmental News Service]. That wave travels 10,000 times the typical speed of this chemical reaction, and the heat blasts electrons down the tubes. Voila, electric current.

This previously unknown phenomenon opens up an entirely new area of energy research, Strano says, and the technology’s potential applications are exciting. Strano envisions thermopower waves that could enable ultra-small electronic devices, no larger than a grain of rice, perhaps a sensor or treatment device that could be injected into the body. Or they might be used in “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust in the air,” he says [Environmental News Service].

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100 gigahertz of processing power—not bad for a single sheet of atoms.

In a paper in Science, researchers at IBM say they have created the fastest-ever graphene transistor, with a cut-off frequency (the highest it can go without significant signal degradation) that at 100 GHz is nearly four times higher than their previous attempt. Similar silicon-based transistors have only been able to reach a turtle-like clock rate of about 40 GHz, or 40 billion cycles per second.

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