The semiconductor industry is faced with the challenge of supplying ever faster and more powerful chips. The Next-Generation Lithography with EUV radiation will help meeting that challenge. Fraunhofer researchers have developed key components. Flat computers, powerful cell phones and tablets -- the integrated circuits, our computers' power centers, are becoming increasingly smaller and more complex. The microchips in today's computers already contain some two billion transistors. To get the chip density right, the structures are exposed onto the chips by means of lithography. To be able to…

It’s easy to see that University of Cincinnati design students Alex Broerman and Ashley Ma are on to something with their new design and prototype for a prescription-medicine pill bottle that better serves the needs of the blind and visually impaired by means of a simple and inexpensive innovation. The design and prototype by Ma and Broerman will be on display June 5-9 at “DAAPworks,” the display of senior projects in UC’s nationally top-ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). In fact, the two students have filed for a provisional patent on their design – a design…

Hypersolar, the developer of a breakthrough technology to produce renewable hydrogen using water and sunlight, today announced that recent development breakthroughs will allow its technology to use most any source of water for the production of renewable and carbon-free hydrogen fuel. By eliminating the need for clean water, the company is able to reduce the cost of renewable hydrogen. The company has teamed up with the University of California at Santa Barbara to accelerate the development process. Conventional electrolysis of water uses electrical voltage to split water molecules into…

SPACE exploration may have a new direction. In the 1960s, humans did the exploring but since the last moon landing in 1972, NASA's only explorers beyond low Earth orbit have been semi-autonomous robots. Now the agency is pondering a third approach, sending astronauts who would remain in orbit around alien worlds and explore via robotic rovers.On Earth, human-controlled robots are used for tasks ranging from delicate surgery to exploration of the deep sea. But in space, robotic "telepresence" could be even more promising.Telerobotics would be orders of magnitude more productive for exploration…

With multiple jamming segments and four control cables, the robotic arm can flex and grip like an elephant's trunkRegular readers might remember the robotic universal gripper that can pick up a wide variety of objects thanks to an elastic membrane filled with coffee grounds. Earlier this year, the developers revealed they had given their versatile gripper the ability to “shoot” objects some distance, and now a team at MIT has “extended” the technology to create a robotic arm that can twist, flex and grip in a way not dissimilar to an elephant’s trunk.Just like the universal gripper developed…

By taking advantage of graphene’s favorable electrical and optical properties, and then adding an organic dopant, researchers have achieved the highest power conversion efficiency yet for a graphene-based solar cell. The 1.9% power conversion efficiency of the undoped devices increases by more than four times to 8.6% after doping. The researchers, led by Sefaattin Tongay and Arthur F. Hebard at the University of Florida in Gainesville, have published their study on the high-efficiency graphene solar cells in a recent issue of Nano Letters. “Here, not only we have taken advantage of graphene's…

A pioneering study to gauge the toxicity of quantum dots in primates has found the tiny crystals to be safe over a one-year period, a hopeful outcome for doctors and scientists seeking new ways to battle diseases like cancer through nanomedicine. The research, which will appear on May 20 in Nature Nanotechnology online, is likely the first to test the safety of quantum dots in primates. In the study, scientists found that four rhesus monkeys injected with cadmium-selenide quantum dots remained in normal health over 90 days. Blood and biochemical markers stayed in typical ranges, and major…

The field of motorized recreational toys is currently undergoing a renaissance due to the availability of high performance electric motors, new materials, computer aided design, new manufacturing techniques and a new wave of educated designers with no understanding of the word "cannot." The Quadrofoil is a prime example of this phenomenon, having been created by three young Slovenian designers inside six months, and launched at Slovenia's Internautica exhibition last week. So successful has been the response from the public that a short production run of 100 units will be completed before the…

Laos is booming, nowhere is that more visible than in Vientiane, with the capital city growing in population by 5% per year and due to double in size in the next 20 years. Lao people are seeing huge increases in service provision and opportunity, but as the city grows, it has to face up to a difficult problem _ its air quality is getting worse. The geographical location of Vientiane is partly to blame; with wind speeds typically only a couple of metres per second, the vehicle pollution does not really blow away from the city. But now with vehicle numbers growing at around 14% per year in…

Researchers at UC San Diego used experimental results and modeling studies to discover that the human copper transporter protein forms a trimer (purple, aqua, and red) in a cell’s membrane, with one end (top) extending outside the cell and the other end (bottom) extending into the cell’s cytoplasm. Credit: Igor Tsigelny, San Diego Supercomputer Center and Department of Neurosciences, UC San Diego. A team of University of California, San Diego researchers has made new discoveries about a copper-transporting protein in the membranes of human cells that drug-discovery scientists can co-opt for…

This diagram shows alternating stripes of charges and spins that self-organize in a particular nickel oxide at sufficiently low temperatures. This pattern constitutes a new quantum state, and it provides a model system that scientists can use to learn about electron correlations and their impact on the properties of materials. Doped holes (dark red in the background) primarily reside on the nickel “3+” atoms (red circles) located in every fourth vertical row. This is called the “charge order” (CO). The electron spins (arrows) of each of the next three rows of nickel “2+” atoms (gray circles)…