News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Two pathways diverged in a chemical synthesis, and one molecule took them both. Chemists at the University of Tokyo have studied how molecular building blocks can either form a spherical cage or an ultrathin sheet that shows some of the basic properties of a "smart" material that can respond to its environment.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have developed an optical switch that routes light from one computer chip to another in just 20 billionths of a second -- faster than any other similar device. The compact switch is the first to operate at voltages low enough to be integrated onto low-cost silicon chips and redirects light with very low signal loss.

An international team of scientists led by researchers from the Laboratory of Nanomaterials at the Skoltech Center for Photonics and Quantum Materials (CPQM) have rationally designed a novel p-type flexible transparent conductor using single-walled carbon nanotubes. This opens new avenues for its applications in next generation opto-electronics and energy technologies. The results of the study were published in the prestigious international journal Nano Energy.

Rice University engineers print 3D blocks based on theoretical tubulanes and find they're nearly as hard as diamond.

To seamlessly integrate electronics with the natural world, materials are needed that are both stretchable and degradable -- for example, flexible medical devices that conform to the surfaces of internal organs, but that dissolve and disappear when no longer needed. However, introducing these properties to electronics has been challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed stretchable, degradable semiconductors that could someday find applications in health and environmental monitoring.

Physicists from the German research center Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) are working to produce engineered magnetic nanostructures and to tailor material properties at the nanoscale. The scientists use a special microscope at the HZDR Ion Beam Center to achieve this goal. This microscope's ultrathin ion beam is capable of producing stable, periodically arranged nanomagnets in a sample material. The device can also be used to optimize the magnetic properties of carbon nanotubes.