Researchers at the University of Cambridge, working with colleagues in Italy and China, have incorporated washable, stretchable, and breathable integrated electronic circuits into fabric for the first time — opening up new possibilities for smart textiles and wearable textile electronic devices.
The circuits were made with cheap, safe, and environmentally friendly inks, and printed using conventional inkjet-printing techniques.
As luck would have it, we may be on the verge of another revolution in miniaturization, this time through nanoelectronics.
Creating electronics at the nanoscale is difficult and has faced limitations but those limitations may be a thing of the past. Researchers from the National University of Singapore have developed a “converter” for nanoelectronic devices that could allow them to use plasmons for data processing.
To understand why that’s so important though, it’s best we start by explaining how nanoelectronic devices work.
A demonstration of the pressure sensor built by bacteria in action as a researcher taps out some Morse code.
As wonderfully bizarre as it sounds, growing touch screens from a bacterial soup isn’t the team’s ultimate goal.
Materials scientists have long sought to blur the line between the inorganic and organic, explain Neydis Morales and Dr. Megan McClean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who were not involved in the work.
Every modern economy wants its own version of Silicon Valley and in Japan the urge to find or create one is just as strong. Although the country’s pedigree as an innovator is not in doubt, rapidly adapting to the digital age has proven challenging for its once-mighty consumer electronics companies.
Fukuoka, Kyoto and Tokyo’s Shibuya district are all staking their claim.
A UK supermarket has become the first in the world to let shoppers pay for groceries using just the veins in their fingertips.
Customers at the Costcutter store, at Brunel University in London, can now pay using their unique vein pattern to identify themselves.
The firm behind the technology, Sthaler, has said it is in “serious talks” with other major UK supermarkets to adopt hi-tech finger vein scanners at pay points across thousands of stores.
A Sandia National Laboratories-led team has for the first time used optics rather than electronics to switch a nanometer-thick thin film device from completely dark to completely transparent, or light, at a speed of trillionths of a second.
The team led by principal investigator Igal Brener published a Nature Photonics paper this spring with collaborators at North Carolina State University. The paper describes work on optical information processing, such as switching or light polarization control using light as the control beam, at terahertz speeds, a rate much faster than what is achievable today by electronic means, and a smaller overall device size than other all-optical switching technologies.
Electrons spinning around inside devices like those used in telecommunications equipment have a speed limit due to a slow charging rate and poor heat dissipation, so if significantly faster operation is the goal, electrons might have to give way to photons.
How will our relationship to technology evolve in the future? Will we regard it as something apart from ourselves, part of ourselves, or as a new area of evolution? In this new video from the Galactic Public Archives, Futurist Gray Scott explains that we are a part of a technological cosmos. Do you agree with Scott that technology is built into the universe, waiting to be discovered?
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