System Bits: April 12


Highly aligned, wafer-scale films Rice University researchers, with support from Los Alamos National Laboratory, have created inch-wide, flexible, wafer-scale films of highly aligned and closely packed carbon nanotubes with the help of a simple filtration process. The chirality-enriched single-walled carbon nanotubes assemble themselves by the millions into long rows that are aligned better... » read more

System Bits: March 15


Drilling into metabolic details with big data In a development that may help researchers find new therapeutic targets for cancer and other diseases, Rice University researchers have created a fast computational method to model tissue-specific metabolic pathways. The team explained that metabolic pathways are immense networks of biochemical reactions that keep organisms functioning and are a... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 19


Electromagnetic properties of graphene-boron nitride materials Rice University and Montreal Polytechnic researchers reported that developing novel materials from the atoms up goes faster when some of the trial and error is eliminated. The work aims to simplify development of certain exotic materials for next-generation electronics. Specifically, Rouzbeh Shahsavari, a Rice materials scient... » read more

System Bits: Dec. 8


Untraceable text-messaging Anonymity networks, like Tor, which sit on top of the public Internet, were meant to conceal Web-browsing habits but recent research by MIT has shown that adversaries can infer a great deal about the sources of supposedly anonymous communications by monitoring data traffic though a few well-chosen nodes in an anonymity network. To fight this growing concern, a tea... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 8


Reducing transistor switching power One of the great challenges in electronics has been to reduce power consumption during transistor switching operation. However, engineers at University of California, Santa Barbara, and Rice University demonstrated a new transistor that switches at only 0.1 volts and reduces power dissipation by over 90% compared to state-of-the-art MOSFETs. "The steepn... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 25


Silicon-based quantum computer coding With the goal of removing lingering doubts quantum computers can become a reality, researchers at the University of New South Wales have proven – with what they say is the highest score ever obtained – that a quantum version of computer code can be written and manipulated using two quantum bits in a silicon microchip, removing any doubt silicon ca... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 17


Speedy nano-scale subs For years, researchers have been developing nano-scale submarines. In theory, nano-subs could be used in various applications. For example, they could navigate inside the human body and transport medicine to various organs. The problem? Most nano-subs use or generate toxic chemicals, according to researchers from Rice University. Seeking to solve the problem, Rice ... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 10


Wrapping silver nanowires While they hold promise for applications including flexible displays and solar cells, silver nanowires are also susceptible to damage from highly energetic UV radiation and harsh environmental conditions has limited their commercialization, according to Purdue University researchers. However, new research suggests wrapping the nanowires with an ultrathin layer of c... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 20


Automating big-data analysis Until now, big-data analysis consisted of searching for buried patterns that had some kind of predictive power but picking which “features” of the data to analyze usually required some human intuition. Now, however, MIT researchers are aiming to take the human element out of big-data analysis with a new system that they say not only searches for patterns but... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 29


Light detector on a chip for portable sensors The invention by Vanderbilt University and Ohio University researchers of the first integrated circularly polarized light detector on a silicon chip could open the door for development of small, portable sensors to expand the use of polarized light in drug screening, surveillance, optical communications, quantum computing, and other applications. ... » read more

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