Hasta La Gadget!

Pixel density enthusiasts, pay close attention, because science is ready to blow your minds — the University of Michigan has developed an LCD technology that can display their logo in a space just nine microns high. By creating a filter made of microscopic metal gratings with differently sized holes just a few hundred nanometers wide, researchers discovered they could precisely capture wavelengths associated to red, green and blue light, producing pixels roughly eight times smaller than those in the iPhone 4’s famous screen, and entire images that could practically fit inside a single dot of Kopin’s microdisplay.

Meanwhile, OLEDs (which don’t require filters to produce their color) saw a nanotech breakthrough of their own last week, as a group at the University of Florida have discovered that carbon nanotubes can revitalize a once-inefficient but promising vertical stacking technique. Layering thin sheets of aluminum, carbon nanotubes, organic material and finally gold on top of a glass substrate, scientists have created OLEDs that promise to be cheaper, faster and require one-tenth of the power of those using polycrystalline silicon, and could theoretically be printed as a flexible display as well. Here’s hoping we’ll see the fruits of these fellows’ labors soon — we can’t wait to pen a follow-up to this epic fight.

Nanotechnology enables ultra high-def LCDs, cheaper stacked-electrode OLED screens originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Forget old and busted X-rays, T-rays are the future, man! It was only recently that we were discussing Terahertz lasers and their potential to see through paper, clothes, plastic, flesh, and other materials, but that discourse had to end on the sad note that nobody had managed to make them usable in a practical and economically feasible way. The major hurdle to overcome was the diffusion of Terahertz radiation — which results in weak, unfocused lasers — but now researchers from the universities of Harvard and Leeds seem to believe they’ve managed to do it. Using metamaterials to collimate T-rays into a “tightly bound, high powered beam” will, they claim, permit semiconductor lasers (i.e. the affordable kind) to perform the duties currently set aside for sophisticated machinery costing upwards of $160,000. Harvard has already filed a patent application for this innovation, and if things pan out, we might be seeing body scanners (both for medical and security purposes), manufacturing quality checks, and a bunch of other things using the extra special THz stuff to do their work.

Metamaterials used to focus Terahertz lasers, make them useful originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man, if only this had been discovered before Ariadne was tasked with building impossible dreams. A team of scientists caught high-fiving over at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have a new and riveting announcement to share, and it revolves around our old and trusted friend, graphene. This go ’round, the self-proclaimed “extraordinary form of carbon” is being stressed to its max, but not without good reason. Thanks to inquisitive minds and a “stroke of serendipity,” a research team was able to create magnetic fields in excess of 300 tesla by simply straining graphene in a certain way. For physicists, the discovery is a dream come true, particularly when you realize that magnetic fields in excess of 85 tesla were practically impossible to come across in a laboratory setting. The benefits here? It’s honestly too early to tell, but gurus in the field are already suggesting that the “opportunities for basic science with strain engineering [are] huge.” Something tells us Magneto would concur.

Strained graphene leads to pseudo-magnetic fields, bends physics even further originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seems like Harvard wasn’t content with making robotic bees, and has taken its quest for miniaturization right down to the nanoscale level. One nanometer-wide, single-stranded DNA molecules are the topic of the university’s latest research, which sets out a way they can be used to create “3D prestressed tensegrity structures.” Should these theoretical scribblings ever pan out in the real world, we could see the resulting self-assembled nanodevices facilitating drug delivery targeted directly at the diseased cells, and even the reprogramming of human stem cells. Infusing a nanodevice with the relevant DNA data passes instructions on to your stem cells, which consequently turn into, for example, new bone tissue or neurons to augment your fleshy CPU. Yes, we’re kinda freaked out, but what’s cooler than being able to say you’re going to the doctor for a shot of nanotransformers?

Self-assembling nanodevices could advance medicine one tiny leap at a time originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Jun 2010 02:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Blu-ray was already looking mighty fine at 25GB of storage per layer — and if Sony manages to make the indigo foil sheets hold 33.4GB each, we certainly won’t complain — but Japanese researchers have discovered a compound that could leapfrog Blu-ray entirely. Scientists at the University of Tokyo discovered that by hitting 5-nanometer titanium pentoxide crystals with a laser, they could get the metal to change color and conduct less electricity, leading to what they believe is an effective new medium for optical data storage. At 5nm, the small black crystals could reportedly hold 1,000 times the data of Blu-ray at the same density, and cost less to boot — the scholars reportedly synthesized the formula simply by adding hydrogen to the common, comparatively cheap titanium dioxide, while heating the compound over a fire. Ahh, nanotechnology — making our lives easier, one microscopic crystal or tube at a time.

5nm crystals could lead to vastly larger optical discs, mighty fine time machines originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 03:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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