System Bits: Feb. 23


Making electrons act like liquid While electrical resistance is a simple concept in that rather like friction slowing down an object rolling on a surface, resistance slows the flow of electrons through a conductive material, and now, MIT professor of physics Leonid Levitov and Gregory Falkovich, a professor at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have found that electrons can sometimes tur... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 16


WW seismic network app UC Berkeley researchers have released a free Android app that uses a smartphone’s ability to record ground shaking from an earthquake, with the goal of creating a worldwide seismic detection network that could eventually warn users of impending jolts from nearby quakes. The app, called MyShake, is available from the Google Play Store and runs in the background with... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 9


Securing RFID chips Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that they say is virtually impossible to hack, and which could secure credit cards, key cards, and pallets of goods in warehouses. The researchers reminded that if such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn’t steal your credi... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 9


Molybdenum disulfide memristors Researchers at Michigan Technological University constructed an ideal memristor based on molybdenum disulfide nanosheets. "Different from an electrical resistor that has a fixed resistance, a memristor possesses a voltage-dependent resistance," said Yun Hang Hu, professor of materials science and engineering at MTU, adding that a material's electric propert... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 2


Wearable sensors reveal health data from sweat In the name of science, UC Berkeley researchers want you to break out into a sweat — so it can be analyzed, of course. Specifically, the researchers have created a flexible sensor system that can measure metabolites and electrolytes in sweat, calibrate the data based upon skin temperature and sync the results in real time to a smartphone. The... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 26


Precisely controlling graphene molecules Researchers at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute have found that in the same way gardeners may use sheets of plastic with strategically placed holes to allow plants to grow but keep weeds from taking root, the same basic approach can be applied in terms of placing molecules in the specific patterns they need within tiny nanoelectronic devices, w... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 26


New switchable material Two MIT researchers developed a thin-film material whose phase and electrical properties can be switched between metallic and semiconducting simply by applying a small voltage. The material then stays in its new configuration until switched back by another voltage. The discovery could pave the way for a new kind of nonvolatile memory. The findings involve the thin-... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 26


Giant vice Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), a research center within the Helmholtz Association, has installed a giant vise or press in its organization. The vise, dubbed the Large Volume Press (LVP), measures 4.5 meters in height and weighs 35 tons. It can exert a force of up to 500 tons on each of its three axes. [caption id="attachment_25030" align="alignleft" width="160"] Th... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 12


Incandescent bulbs might not be dead yet Can incandescent bulbs be as efficient – or even more so – than LEDs? More than 95 percent of the energy that goes into incandescents is wasted, most of it as heat, so researchers at MIT and Purdue University struck out to see if that could be changed. A conventional heated metal filament, with all its attendant losses, served as the basis. But... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 12


Coaxing human stem cells to form human organs In a step toward personalized drug testing, MIT researchers have coaxed human stem cells to form complex tissues in a new technique, which also has near-term implications for growing organ-like tissues on a chip and that may ultimately allow personalized organs to be grown for transplant patients. The researchers said growing organs on demand, u... » read more

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