It seems that every day brings a new electronic gadget to the market, whether it’s a smart phone, an electronic reader, a laptop the size and weight of a magazine, or a television the size of a wall. But each advance adds to the world’s electronic waste, which is the fastest-growing component of solid waste. Much of the electronic refuse ends up in developing countries, where workers strip down the gadgets to get at the copper and other valuable metals inside, often exposing themselves to toxins in the process. Now, scientists are calling for federal regulations in the United States to stem the tide.
Although the U.S. is one the world’s largest producers of electronic waste (e-waste), it is hardly a leader in addressing this problem, given that the country has “no legally enforceable federal policies requiring comprehensive recycling of e-waste or elimination of hazardous substances from electronic products,” the researchers say [Scientific American]. Instead, e-waste policies are left to the states, not all of which have laws on the books. In the article, published in Science, the authors note that the United States has not ratified the Basel Convention, which regulates the movement of hazardous wastes across international borders and has the support of 169 of the 192 United Nations member countries [Scientific American].
Electronics can contain a host of dangerous materials, from heavy metals to toxic chemicals. Toxic e-waste shows up in forms as varied as high lead levels in the blood of children in Guiya, China, where millions of tonnes of e-waste are illegally dumped, and as fire-retardant chemicals in the eggs of California’s peregrine falcons [CBC News].
A new discovery about how mantis shrimp process light could give rise to new and more powerful consumer electronics, according to a new study. Mantis shrimp possess the animal kingdom’s most complicated eyes, capable of distinguishing between 100,000 colors — 10 times as many as humans — and seeing circular polarized light, or CPL, which can’t be detected by any other creature [Wired.com]. Circular polarized light is one of two forms of polarized light, or light waves that travel in a specific plane.
The specialized CPL detecting cells in shrimp eye are similar to the optical detectors found in DVD players; each can convert polarized light into other forms so it can be stored or processed. However, shrimp eyes can do this with all colors of circular polarized light across the spectrum, according to the study in Nature Photonics. The detectors in DVD and CD players can only recognize circular polarized light in a few colors. The research team thinks that in the future, optics devices might be beefed up by chemically engineered crystals that could mimic the light polarizing cells of the mantis shrimp eye.
Tired of cellphones and other electronic gadgets that run out of juice too quickly? Then you can happily look forward to further developments from the lab of researcher Jae Wan Kwon, who has developed a long-lasting nuclear battery the size and thickness of a penny. In time, Kwon hopes to get the size down so that the battery is no thicker than a human hair.
The batteries pose no danger of a nuclear meltdown, Kwon notes. Although nuclear batteries generate electricity from atomic energy like nuclear reactors, they don’t use a chain reaction, instead using the emissions from a radioactive isotope to generate electricity [Gizmag]. As the isotope naturally decays, the charged particles released can be used to create an electrical current. Nuclear batteries, which hold their charges for years, are already used in some specialty fields. For example, they’re used to power spacecraft that are voyaging too far from the sun to run on solar panels, and also in pacemakers, since changing a battery inside the body would be rather inconvenient. But the existing batteries are large and expensive.
Three scientists who mastered light through technology have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for physics, for breakthroughs that the prize committee said “helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies.” Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Charles Kao (pictured), for his work on fiber optics, while the other half will be divided between Willard Boyle and George Smith, two retired researchers from Bell Labs who invented the first imaging technology using a digital sensor instead of film, paving the way for the creation of digital cameras.
Kao’s discovery in fiber optics set the stage for the technological revolution that underpins today’s global communication systems, powering broadband internet connections and carrying data transmissions around the world. In 1966, he figured out how to transmit light for more than 100 kilometers using optical glass fibers, five times the length of the most advanced fibers then available [Bloomberg]. Fiber optics have become ubiquitous in today’s wired, networked world; the Nobel committee noted that if all the optical cables in use today were unraveled, it would equal a single thread more than a billion kilometers long, enough to circle the globe 25,000 times.
Long gone are the days when a “robotic movement” meant something jerky, awkward, and stiff: The new robo-fish that have just been unveiled by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology swim through the water with sinuous grace. The flexible fish move naturally, as the motor in the middle initiates a wave that moves along the body and propels it forward. Real fish move in a similar fashion by contracting muscles on either side of their bodies [CNET]. The robo-fish are the descendants of Charlie the Robotuna, a large robot created at MIT in the 1990s that consisted of almost 3,000 parts. The new fish measure less than a foot long and use only 10 parts; researchers say the simple, durable fish are cheap to produce and hard to damage. To manufacture each robot, a single motor is placed in a fish-shaped mold before a liquid polymer is poured in and allowed to solidify. The continuous polymer casing prevents water from seeping in and damaging the motor, says Pablo Alvarado, an engineer who helped design the fish. “These materials are very resilient,” he said. “Water can’t do much to them and they can survive very high temperatures. Unless another fish eats them, they could go on and on” [Wired.com].
What if you could take a video billboard like those that light up Times Square and wrap it around a bus–without impeding the passengers’ view through the windows? While some folks who worry about ads saturating our environment would probably be horrified, others might admit that it would be a pretty neat technological trick. Now, a new method of producing the inorganic light emitting diodes (ILEDs) that light up billboards offers a possible way to bring that trick about.
The findings, published in Science, come as something of a surprise. It’s been organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) that have been a hot field of research lately, as scientists experimented with ways to spread films of organic compounds–which emit light when an electric current passes through them–over thin, flexible surfaces. But OLEDs aren’t very powerful, which caused lead researcher John Rogers to look for new ways to make inorganic diodes. Says Rogers: “If you look at the billboard displays that exist already, they’re inorganic LED based…. You can see them on a bright sunny day; it would be impossible to generate that kind of brightness out of an organic LED” [BBC News].
Although electronic cigarettes have recently been marketed as a safer alternative to traditional smokes, a new analysis of 19 types of the e-cigarettes revealed that they contain toxic chemicals. The FDA has classified the devices as combination drug/medical devices, prohibiting their import, but hasn’t removed them from American shelves. Opponents of e-cigarettes hope the findings will spur the FDA to take more stringent action against the devices.
The results of the FDA’s new analysis, which were announced yesterday, revealed that although e-cigarettes don’t burn tobacco, the devices contain substances known to be toxic, such as diethylene glycol, a component of antifreeze that proved deadly when it was illegally added to toothpaste. They also contain nitrosamines, known carcinogens found in tobacco smoke. The findings, which were announced on Wednesday, contradict claims by electronic cigarette manufacturers that their products are safe alternatives to tobacco and contain little more than water vapor, nicotine and propylene glycol, which is used to create artificial smoke in theatrical productions. When heated, the liquid produces a vapor that users inhale through the battery-powered device [The New York Times].
Developing nations may be where infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis flourish, but ironically, these regions often have the fewest resources for equipment to diagnose the maladies.
A new fluorescence microscope, however, could offer an affordable solution: One that attaches to an ordinary mobile phone. Once snapped on to any mobile phone that has a basic camera function, the microscope can illuminate pathogens, allowing the viewer to identify them and even send the image to a health care facility, according to an article published in the journal PLoS ONE.
To use the device, called the CellScope, fluorescent molecular “tags” are added to a blood sample, which attach themselves to a certain pathogen, such as tuberclosis-causing bacteria. The pathogens are then illuminated by microscope, which uses cheap commercial light-emitting diodes as the light source – in place of the high-power, gas-filled lamps used in laboratory versions of the device, and cheap optical filters to isolate the light coming from the fluorescent tags [BBC News]. The apparatus allows the viewer to “see” things as small as one-millionth of a meter.
Researchers have created a fabric that acts like a camera, made of tiny light-sensitive fibers that turn light waves into images. Says lead researcher Yoel Fink: “While the current version of these fabrics can only image nearby objects, it can still see much farther than most shirts can” [LiveScience].
Fink notes that the technology does away with one of the most basic camera components: the lens. Just like in an eye, cameras use a curved lens to focus the light waves reflected off an object, but the system contains an Achilles’ heel: Damage the lens, and you lose or diminish the ability to see [ScienceNOW Daily News]. By getting rid of the lens, researchers say they can develop a technology that is less vulnerable to damage–if one part of the fabric gets damaged, the rest can still function. “We are saying, ‘instead of a tiny, sensitive object [for capturing images], let’s construct a large, distributed system,’” Fink said [LiveScience].
Computers powered by frickin’ laser beams just came a step closer. Light-based, or photonic, computers would theoretically be much faster and smaller than the electronic computers we use today, but researchers have had a hard time putting theory into action. Now, a new study has shown that two laser beams can be harnassed to turn a single molecule into a transistor. However, the specialized conditions necessary for the trick to work mean that computer stores won’t have photonic sections anytime soon.
Conventional computers are based on transistors, which allow one electrode to control the current moving through the device and are combined to form logic gates and processors. The new component achieves the same thing, but for laser beams, not electric currents. A green laser beam is used to control the power of an orange laser beam passing through the device [New Scientist]. In the study, published in Nature, the green beam could make the orange beam either weak or strong, which is analagous to an electronic transistor turning a current on or off.
Would you like to wear your Facebook profile on the sleeve of your T-shirt? Or maybe the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude would like to wrap a building in computer screens? Such marvels may one day be possible due to a stretchy display researchers created by connecting organic light-emitting diodes to a new rubbery conductor. Researchers say the display is remarkably durable–they bent it, folded it in half, and even crumpled it up without affecting its performance. What’s more, the display, which is thinner and less power-hungry than equivalent plasma and LCD screens, is produced through a cheap industrial printing process [Fast Company].
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are not yet familiar technology, but many researchers think they’ll play an important part in the next generation of electronics. The organic compounds in an OLED system emit light when an electric current is passed through them and need no backlight, which means they draw less power and can be thinner than a typical liquid crystal display (LCD) screen. But the real breakthrough in the current research is in the stretchy conductor underlying the OLEDs.
The online bookseller Amazon is expected to unveil a larger model of its Kindle e-reader at a press conference today, and the company hopes that the device will revolutionize several old-media industries: textbook publishing and the newspaper and magazine business. Photos show that the new reader will be about the size of a sheet of paper and will have a 9.7-inch screen, which will be more conducive to displaying content from textbooks, newspapers, and magazines.
The new product will be unveiled at Pace University, one of six colleges that will use the Kindle to distribute course material to students next fall in a technological test run. Experts say that bringing college textbooks to a light and portable e-reader makes loads of sense. Anyone who’s been to a U.S. college in the past few decades could tell you that textbooks are very highly–some would say obscenely–priced. They’re also bulky, and often difficult to get rid of once purchased: Selling the third edition of an introductory biology textbook on the used-book market is pretty difficult when the fourth edition comes out a year later. Theoretically, this should be the perfect market for an electronic reader like the Kindle…. “I do think the textbook market will be the killer app for e-readers,” said Sarah Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research [CNET]. However, Epps added that it would probably take several years for the technology to catch on, and for publishers to reach acceptable profit-sharing agreements.
When Adam Wilson wants to update his Twitter feed, he doesn’t have to tap out a single keystroke–brainwaves are all he needs. On April 1st, he used a brain-to-Twitter communication system to transmit this message: “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET.” That message may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Brain-computer interfaces are no longer just a gee-whiz technology, but a platform for researchers interested in immediate real-world applications for people who can think, but can’t move [Wired].
The system uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the electrical activity in the user’s brain. Explains University of Wisconsin professor Justin Williams: “All the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually…. And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity” [MSNBC]. After the message has been painstakingly assembled, letter by letter, the user sends it by focusing on the “Twit” box on the screen. When that flashes and the EEG reader picks up the brain signal, the message is sent to Twitter.
Two groups of researchers have found ways to “unzip” carbon nanotubes to make nanoribbons of graphene, and experts say the development could point the way towards a new generation of electronics, including computer chips that are faster and tinier than the silicon-based chips used today.
Graphene, an atom-thick sheet of honeycombed carbon, is one of the hottest materials around. It conducts electrons well, but is thin, transparent and strong, making it potentially useful in displays and solar panels. Ribbons of graphene could be more useful still. At widths of around 10 nanometres or less, electrons are forced to move lengthwise, and make the graphene behave as a semiconductor [Nature News].
However, the ribbons have proved extremely difficult to produce. Previously, nanoribbons of graphene [were] cut from larger sheets using chemical methods that, like a blunt pair of scissors, offer little control over the width of the ribbons [New Scientist].
The mechanical energy produced when your body moves could be harnessed to power electronic gadgets thanks to what researchers are calling a “nanogenerator.” The nanotech device is made of tiny zinc oxide nanowires, which have piezoelectric properties–meaning that they generate a tiny electrical pulse when they’re bent, stretched, or otherwise subjected to mechanical stress. According to Zhong Lin Wang, lead researcher, the device could be used to charge gadgets such as iPods and BlackBerrys as well as having a impact on defence technology, environmental monitoring and biomedical sciences. “This technology can be used to generate energy under any circumstances as long as there is movement,” he said [Financial Times].
In a video demonstration, Wang attached a single nanowire to the back of a hamster and then hooked it up to an oscilloscope. As the rodent … scurried around, it generated 70 millivolts [the equivalent of .o7 volts]. When the critter stopped to lick itself, the power levels decreased [Wired].
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It seems that every day brings a new electronic gadget to the market, whether it’s a smart phone, an electronic reader, a laptop the size and weight of a magazine, or a television the size of a wall. But each advance adds to the world’s electronic waste, which is the fastest-growing component of solid waste. Much of the electronic refuse ends up in developing countries, where workers strip down the gadgets to get at the copper and other valuable metals inside, often exposing themselves to toxins in the process. Now, scientists are calling for federal regulations in the United States to stem the tide.
A new discovery about how 
Tired of cellphones and other electronic gadgets that run out of juice too quickly? Then you can happily look forward to further developments from the lab of researcher Jae Wan Kwon, who has developed a long-lasting 
Three scientists who mastered light through technology 
What if you could take a video billboard like those that light up Times Square and wrap it around a bus–without impeding the passengers’ view through the windows? While some folks who 
Although electronic 
Developing nations may be where 
Researchers have created a fabric that acts like a camera, made of tiny light-sensitive fibers that turn 
Computers powered by frickin’ laser beams just came a step closer. Light-based, or photonic, computers would theoretically be much faster and smaller than the electronic 
Would you like to wear your Facebook profile on the sleeve of your T-shirt? Or maybe the artists 
The online bookseller Amazon is expected to unveil a larger model of its Kindle e-reader at a press conference today, and the company hopes that the device will revolutionize several old-media industries: textbook publishing and the newspaper and magazine business. Photos show that the new reader will be about the size of a sheet of paper and will have a 
When Adam Wilson wants to update 
Two groups of researchers have found ways to “unzip” carbon nanotubes to make nanoribbons of graphene, and experts say the development could point the way towards a new generation of 
The mechanical energy produced when your body moves could be harnessed to power electronic gadgets thanks to what researchers are calling a “nanogenerator.” The 
