An ultrathin film containing 1-nanometer thick clay particles has been created for the first time, an accomplishment that may yield new materials and devices for medicine, electronics and engineering, according to Purdue University and Belgian scientists.

Using a method that captures clay particles on a crystal, Purdue and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven research partners were able to produce, see and manipulate a single layer of clay. It would take 70,000 of these layers to equal the thickn

Anyone who buys a swayed plank of wood has to be, well, warped.

But a Texas forestry sciences researcher may have a straight-forward computer model just around the bend, saving millions for wood manufacturers and consumers.
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“Wood is an old material that has been used in construction for thousands of years,” said Dr. Zhiyong Cai, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station forest products researcher. “Every place in the world uses wood products, but there still are things we don

A new type of very thin solar cell made from inexpensive materials has been invented by researchers at the Hahn Meitner Institute in Berlin, Germany, in collaboration with a colleague now at Portland State University, Oregon, USA. The new device will be much cheaper to make because it uses less expensive semiconductor materials than conventional solar cells. The researchers publish details of their invention in the Institute of Physics journal Semiconductor Science & Technology on 14 April 2003.

Purdue University researchers have made a discovery that may lead to the development of an innovative liquid-cooling system for future computer chips, which are expected to generate four times more heat than today’s chips.

Researchers had thought that bubbles might block the circulation of liquid forced to flow through “microchannels” only three times the width of a human hair. Engineers also thought that small electric pumps might be needed to push liquid through the narrow channels, incre

Computer Simulations Provide Insight On Light Degradation Effect in Solar Cells

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University’s Microelectronics Research Center may have solved a mystery that has plagued the research community for more than 20 years: Why do solar cells degrade in sunlight? Finding the answer to that question is essential to the advancement of solar cell research and the ability to produce lower-cost electricity from

A pioneering transport system which uses sophisticated computer technology to provide buses on demand may help to solve rural travel problems.

Passengers using the new service benefit from flexible timetables, can influence the journey routes and may be picked up and dropped off on their doorsteps.

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Transport Operations Research Group (TORG) and Northumberland County Council are jointly managing the three-year £750,000 pilot project, w

VTT’s new device promotes clean combustion technology with high plant efficiency

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, offers new opportunities to improve power plant efficiency with its globally unique research equipment. Most power plant types, independent of their fuel, use steam to produce energy. The first of its kind, VTT’s equipment now enables steam to be brought to its supercritical state under research conditions. In this state, the steam may reach a temperatu

Huge pulsed power machine enters fusion arena

Throwing its hat into the ring of machines that offer the possibility of achieving controlled nuclear fusion, Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine has created a hot dense plasma that produces thermonuclear neutrons, Sandia researchers announced today at a news conference at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia.

The neutrons emanate from fusion reactions within a BB-sized deuterium capsule pla

The principal aim of this PhD paper was the application of the new concepts and ideas of Photonic Crystals and Photonic Bandgap (PBG) to microwave and millimetric circuits and, more concretely, to microstrip circuits which is the most common technology in current use in flat microwave circuits.

Thus, for this thesis, the techniques for optimising the functioning of PBG structures in microstrip technology were studied and the various practical applications of these devices were analysed. For

A team of Carnegie Mellon University and NASA scientists will travel to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile in April to conduct research that will help them develop and deploy a robot and instruments that may someday enable other robots to find life on Mars. The researchers will be using the Atacama, described as the most arid region on Earth, as a Martian analog.

The group is funded with a $3 million, three-year grant from NASA to the university’s Robotics Institute. They are collabo

Designers at Staffordshire University have come up with a solutions package with the potential to make life a lot easier for everyone.

The University’s Centre for Rehabilitation Robotics has spent more than a year involved in PACKAGE, a £1.5 million European Commission project concerned with making small changes to consumer packaging in a bid to improve “openability”

Now after rigorous trials carried out throughout Europe, the Centre are hoping that the world’s bigg

The same characteristics that make misfolded proteins known as prions such a pernicious medical threat in neurodegenerative diseases may offer a construction toolkit for manufacturing nanoscale electrical circuits, researchers report this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists working at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Chicago write that they have used the durable, self-assembling fibers formed by prions as

Greater use of clean electricity from the sun should be a step closer, thanks to new research carried out in the UK.

The research has shown how the cost of generating solar electricity can be reduced, laying the foundation for a major expansion in the use of this sustainable energy technology.

The project has been undertaken by a team of physicists, chemists, material scientists and engineers at Sheffield Hallam University, with funding from the Swindon-based Engineering and

Wuppertal Institute and Eurelectric welcome EU initiative

The EU could save an additional ten percent of its energy consumption by 2013 through a broad-scale implementation of energy efficiency services and programmes. The European Commission’s planned Initiative and Directive proposal on Energy Services is to contribute to the realisation of such a target.

These are the issues that around 200 high-profile participants from governments, parliaments, energy industries, e

The manufacture of electronic devices such as the new generation of video mobile phones could be revolutionised thanks to assembly research being pioneered at the University of Greenwich.

This research will provide industry with the microsystems assembly technology to allow cheaper mass production of the next generation of intelligent products, such as mobiles, visual display equipment and medical devices. It could, for example, be used to develop minute ’invisible’ hearing aids.

Scientists and engineers trying to share materials property data over the Internet will have an easier time now thanks to a new computer language called MatML–Materials Markup Language–developed by an international group of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), industry, government laboratories, universities, standards organizations and professional societies. MatML provides a standard format for managing and exchanging materials property data on the World Wide