Mobile phones and smart phones still haven't been adapted to the carrying habits of their users. That much is clear to anyone who has tried sitting down with a mobile phone in their back pocket: the displays of the innumerable phones and pods are rigid and do not yield to the anatomical forms adopted by the people carrying them. By now it is no longer any secret that the big players in the industry are working on flexible displays. Properties that suitable coatings offer in this respect will be demonstrated by the developments of the INM – Leibniz-Institute for New Materials on show nano tech 2015, Tokio, Japan.

Scientists have dramatically improved the performance of the Edison Battery. They have created an ultrafast nickel-iron battery that can be fully charged in about 2 minutes and discharged in less than 30 seconds.

Creating electrical circuits no longer has to be a complex, specialized process thanks to a group of researchers at Georgia Tech. Their technique would allow anyone with an off-the-shelf printer and some other simple items to print their own circuits in basically no time. The entire setup costs approximately $300 (US) and could help home-brew

Today quantum computing is becoming a reality. And while it may look to the layperson like mere mumbo-jumbo, in reality of the technology has largely moved out of the theoretical stage, as recent news indicates.

Brains learn better and forget less when connections are clustered

99 p., [23] leaves of plates : 23 cm

MIT physicist finds the creation of entanglement simultaneously gives rise to a wormhole.

Researchers developed bendable organic carbon nanomaterial compound-based 64bit memory which shows improved data performance by limiting the direction of electric currents.

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Scientists claim that coating health food ingredients such as vitamins and nutrients in nanofibers, created through a process called electrospinning, can serve to better protect them as they pass through the digestive system.

Despite moving toward a paper-free society, we still use paper fairly often in our daily lives. And to be honest, paper isn't that great. It's easily ruined by something as simple as a coffee spill and can spread disease by virtue of its tendency to transmit bacteria and other nasty things. But if we could

Ultrafast lasers have measured how long electrons take to be booted from a helium atom with zeptosecond precision – trillionths of a billionth of a second

More than you might realize

IBM has developed a programming language for tomorrows cognitive computers.

One researcher is working on "computing at the speed of thought" in which humans and computers fully interact.

Scientists demonstrated the ability to control the time-resolved optical responses of hybrid plasmonic nanostructures.

Scientists at Stanford University have found a new way of creating artificial diamonds out of graphite (the material in your pencil leads), without applying external pressure of any sort.

By wearing clothes that have been dip-coated in a silver nanowire (AgNW) solution that is highly radiation-insulating, a person may stay so warm in the winter that they can greatly reduce or even eliminate their need for heating their home. Considering that 47% of global energy is spent on indoor heating, and 42% of that specifically for residential heating, such highly insulating clothing could potentially have huge cost savings. A team of researchers led by Professor Yi Cui, along with PhD student Po-Chun Hsu and others at Stanford University, have published a paper on the AgNW-coated textiles in a recent issue of Nano Letters. As the researchers explain, most strategies to reduce indoor heating focus on improving the insulation of the buildings, such as by using high R-value insulation and low-emissivity windows. However, a large portion of the energy is still wasted on heating empty space and inanimate objects. To avoid this waste, the researchers have used a new strategy called "personal thermal management," which focuses on heating people. They've demonstrated that clothing dipped in a solution of metallic nanowires, such as AgNWs, achieves this goal by both providing passive insulation and allowing for active heating when connected to an external power source. The main advantage of the AgNW-coated clothing is that it reflects over 90% of an individual's body heat (i.e., infrared radiation) back to the individual. This reflectance is much higher than even the warmest wool sweater, as the average clothing material reflects back only about 20% of body heat. This increase in reflectance is due to differences in the materials' emissivity, which is a measure of heat radiation. Low-emissivity materials like silver, which has an emissivity of 0.02, emit less radiation and so provide much better insulation than high-emissivity materials like common textiles, which have an emissivity of about 0.8. Of course, wearing clothing made completely of silver would be impractical and uncomfortable, not to mention expensive. A main reason for this discomfort is that silver, like all metals, is not breathable. For example, Mylar blankets, which are made of aluminum and plastic, are extremely warm but are not vapor-permeable, causing moisture to accumulate on a person's skin. The new AgNW-coated clothing, on the other hand, is breathable due to the nanowires' porous structure. The large spacing between nanowires of about 300 nm offers plenty of room for water vapor molecules, which are about 0.2 nm, to pass through. The 300-nm spacing is still much too small to allow body heat to pass through, since human body radiation has a wavelength of about 9 µm and so interacts with the nanowire cloth as if it were a continuous metal film, and is reflected.

To try to solve the problem of errant space debris in orbit, NASA recently tested adhesive grippers inspired by the feet of geckos in a microgravity test

(Phys.org)—Scientists have found the first direct evidence that a mysterious phase of matter known as the "pseudogap" competes with high-temperature superconductivity, robbing it of electrons that otherwise might pair up to carry current through a material with 100 percent efficiency.

Plasmonic devices combine the 'super speed' of optics with the 'super small' of microelectronics. These devices exhibit quantum effects and show promise as possible ultrafast circuit elements, but current material processing limits this potential. Now, a team of Singapore-based researchers has used a new physical process, known as quantum plasmonic tunneling, to demonstrate the possibility of practical quantum plasmonic devices.

Evidence Found For The Higgs Boson Direct Decay Into Fermions

A nanographene molecule exhibiting carbon-carbon bonds of different length and bond order imaged by noncontact atomic force microscopy using a carbon monoxide functionalized tip. This molecule was synthesized at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Toulouse. Credit: IBM Research

UCLA-led breakthrough could literally reshape solar cells and electronic devices

Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are powerful devices in semiconductor manufacturing and form the basis of countless electronic devices, such as memory chips, photovoltaic cells, logic gates, and sensors. An interesting alternative to inorganic TFTs (silicon) is organic TFTs (OTFTs), which offer the possibility of mass production by using the conventional printing technology and working with low-cost materials. However, numerous inherent problems still remain, especially concerning the long-term stability and lack of reliability.

In 2013 James Hone, Wang Fong-Jen Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia Engineering, and colleagues at Columbia demonstrated that they could dramatically improve the performance of graphene—highly conducting two-dimensional (2D) carbon—by encapsulating it in boron nitride (BN), an insulating material with a similar layered structure.

A team of researched have developed a new kind of smart glass containing materials that enable the triboelectric effect, which captures the energy inherent in static electricity that occurs when two different materials collide. In other words, the glass can not only change color, but create electricity as well.