About 1.4% of the world’s population today is speech impaired, due to conditions such as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), locked-in syndrome (LIS), Encephalopathy (SEM),Parkinson’s disease, and paralysis. Imagine all the people living in Germany today were unable to speak and you’ll come to realize just how far reaching this condition is. So, aside for those being paralyzed, there are a lot
Silly Putty ingredient helps improve batteries
When you think about Silly Putty toys, the last thing that comes to mind is high-tech. A group of researchers, however, used a novel trick to incorporate an ingredient in Silly Putty to improve lithium-ion battery life between charges by three times the industry standard. For what’s it worth, Silly Putty is actually one of the most fascinating man-made materials. One
Novel ionic conducting material acts like artificial muscle and plays music
In a breakthrough moment, researchers at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a novel material resembling a simple transparent disk, which the researchers applied an electrical signal to and used it to play music. This is no ordinary speaker, though. The disk consists of a thin sheet of rubber sandwiched between two layers of a saltwater gel, and represents the
Stretchy electronic circuits mimic nature and allow for flexible computers
Flexible electronics are still in their infancy, however scientists have raved about them for years now. Electronics that can bend and stretch a lot without breaking open up a slew of new possibilities, from smart clothing equipped with all kinds of sensors to flexible micro-devices. Recently, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) made a great leap forward
Transistor nanowires stacked in ‘4-D’ hint to future tech
It’s amazing how this cross-section view on the right showcasing a new type of transistor from Purdue and Harvard universities resembles a Christmass tree, just in the nick of the time for the holiday season. Its design, however, has little to do with a Christmas trees. Make no mistake, the transistor’s shape and design follows a pattern that allows it to operate
MIT engineers create LED that has 230% efficiency. Thermodynamics laws still in place
A group of researchers at MIT have successfully managed to create a light emitting diode (LED) that has an electrical efficiency greater than 100%. This might sound preposterous, and against everything you learned in physics, however the system is still governed by fundamental laws of thermodynamics. This extraordinary power conversion efficiency was obtained by a decrease in applied voltage to
Scientists develop single-atom transistor with ‘perfect’ precision
Australian scientists at University of New South Wales have successfully managed to build the first single-atom transistor, using a scalable, repeatable technique. The scientific community all over the world have already hailed this achievement as a highly important milestone, as single-atom transistors are considered as a critical building block for the eventual development of quantum computers. The tiny device was created
![Time division multiplexing [TDM, left] uses very brief but broad-spectrum laser pulses to send data. Wavelength division multiplexing [WDM, center] packs in bits by using several frequencies of light at once. Orthognonal frequency division multiplexing [OFDM, right] does the same, but uses overlapping frequencies to make better use of the available spectrum. (c) Nature Photonics.](https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/1861781.jpg)
Fastest single laser transmission achieved – 26 terabites/second
In an amazing feat of electrical engineering, scientists have managed to set a new landmark in optical communications by transmitting data at the remarkable speed of 26 terabits per second, or about 700 DVDs downloaded in an instant, all using a single transmitting laser. The research was lead by scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in Germany, who published