News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Some people love spicy food -- the hotter, the better. Others go out of their way to avoid the palate-singeing burn of capsaicin, the compound that gives chili peppers their kick. Now, researchers have developed a portable device (whimsically shaped like a chili pepper) that can reveal how much capsaicin a pepper contains, before biting into it. They report their results in ACS Applied Nano Materials.

Wearable electronics are getting smaller, more comfortable and increasingly capable of interfacing with the human body. To achieve a truly seamless integration, electronics could someday be printed directly on people's skin. As a step toward this goal, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have safely placed wearable circuits directly onto the surface of human skin to monitor health indicators, such as temperature, blood oxygen, heart rate and blood pressure.

Researchers at ETH have managed to make an efficient material for broadband frequency doubling of light using microspheres made of disordered nanocrystals. The crucial idea for the method arose during a coffee break. In the future, the new approach could be used in lasers and other light technologies.

Electronic data is being produced at a breath-taking rate. Around ten zettabytes (ten trillion gigabytes) of data is stored in global server farms, and that's doubling every two years. With computing already consuming 8% of global electricity, low-energy data-storage is a key priority. Next-generation 'multi-state' memory offers a highly energy efficient, low-cost, fast-access solution: stepping 'beyond binary' to store more data than just zeros and ones.

Using radio telescopes observing distant stars, scientists have connected optical atomic clocks on different continents. The results were published in the scientific journal Nature Physics by an international collaboration between 33 astronomers and clock experts at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, Japan), the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM, Italy), the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF, Italy), and the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM, France).

A team led by the University of Washington reports that carefully constructed stacks of graphene -- a 2D form of carbon -- can exhibit highly correlated electron properties. The team also found evidence that this type of collective behavior likely relates to the emergence of exotic magnetic states.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), which aim to construct a pathway for people to interact with computers directly by thought, have received great attention in recent years. An electroencephalogram-based BCI speller, which allows the user to input text to computer using brain signals, is one of the most popular BCI systems. However, researchers in China show that these BCI spellers can be easily attacked, exposing a critical security concern in EEG-based BCI systems.