Have you ever needed to write a message but just couldn’t, because your hands were too occupied, or you were driving? Two Duke University scientists (Ionut Constandache and Sandip Agrawal) have developed a piece of  software that makes use of the phone’s accelerometers (it’s probably an iPhone) to let you just draw the letters in the air with the phone and write your text message.

Neat, isn’t it? Still, I don’t think this will work in an accelerating car, unless they filter out that information, too (it has to be on the 2-dimensional vertical scale).

Just yesterday I was saying to my fiance that I’m all gadgetized: phone, PDA, GPS, laptop, MP3 player. What could I possibly want more? I never thought, though, that all my gadgets are using good-old batteries, that that they need recharging once (or many times) a day.

Information released by Nokia reveals that they will take another step towards energy-independent cell phones, besides embedded solar cells: they’ll make the phone charge itself from the radio waves that surround us in excess. Experiments until now show that they can harvest about 3-5 mW of power, enough to juice up a phone with a depleted battery. The frequency range will be between 500 megahertz and 10 gigahertz – so there’s plenty of band to catch.

The technology will be improved, and other low-consumption devices that will profit from this will be the MP3 players. There’s still one question: what if I go to the countryside, where emitting antennas are far, and there’s where I would need the power most? Do satellites count in?

Graphene is the two-dimensional crystalline form of carbon, whose extraordinary electron mobility and other unique features hold great promise for nanoscale electronics and photonics. But there’s a catch: graphene has no bandgap.

“Having no bandgap greatly limits graphene’s uses in electronics,” says Feng Wang of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he is a member of the Materials Sciences Division. “For one thing, you can build field-effect transistors with graphene, but if there’s no bandgap you can’t turn them off! If you could achieve a graphene bandgap, however, you should be able to make very good transistors.”

Wang, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has achieved just that. He and his colleagues have engineered a bandgap in bilayer graphene that can be precisely controlled from 0 to 250 milli-electron volts (250 meV, or .25 eV).

Using infrared beamline 1.4 at the ALS, under the direction of ALS physicist Michael Martin and Zhao Hao of the Earth Sciences Division, Wang and his colleagues were able to send a tight beam of synchrotron light, focused on the graphene layers, right through the device. As the researchers tuned the electrical fields by precisely varying the voltage of the gate electrodes, they were able to measure variations in the light absorbed by the gated graphene layers. The absorption peak in each spectrum provided a direct measurement of the bandgap at each gate voltage.

“In principle we could have used a tunable laser to measure the optical transmission, but the 1.4 beamline is very bright and can be focused down to the diffraction limit – an important consideration when the graphene-flake target is so small,” Wang says. “Also, compared to a laser, the beamline provides a wider range of frequencies all at once, so we don’t have to painstakingly tune to each absorption frequency we’re trying to measure.”

What these researchers basically did was to create a material that could replace semiconductors one day with a cheap and simple structure, allowing multicolour LEDs to be fabricated. They could be printed on virtually anything, and unleash a whole new set of displaying possibilities.

The next time you worry about your family photos, or some geeky drunk college-fest you took part in, you should really consider where you’re saving your memories, because in a few years you’ll have data storage meant to last. Really – millions of years from now.

Besides lasting that long, the new data storage method invented by scientists can also hold huge amounts of information, because of the nano-scale elements that constitute the material’s basic structure. The group of researchers describes the new storage technique as of placing a single iron crystal only a few billionths of a meter wide inside a hollow carbon nanotube. Just like diamonds, nanotubes are among the most stable structures in existence. Once inserted inside the carbon nanotubes, the iron nanocrystals act as data bits, physically sliding from one end of the tube to the other in response to an electric current and in the process registering either a “1″ or a “0″ in the binary language of computers. “Nothing could be easier, electronically speaking,” says physicist and co-author Alex Zettl of the University of California, Berkeley.

As time goes by, nanotechnology finds its place in our lives more and more, but there’s also a limit to that – it remains to be seen which. You can see a demo of how bits are “moving” in the video below:

The price of electronics has been reflecting the work necessary to make them, since they were invented. Silicon-based transistors broke many barriers when they have been invented several decades ago, making the transition from lamps to a whole new universe of possibilities.

Now, scientists are studying technologies that could change even the once all-mighty silicon transistors, by making them from organic materials. Physicists from Umeå University, Sweden, have invented electronic circuits that can be made from a chemical solution. “This makes it possible to paint thin films of electronic materials on flexible surfaces like paper or plastic,” explains Ludvig Edman.

They have painted a thin film with the solution called fullerene, and then patterned it with a specific structure. Until now, carrying out this sort of patterning has been problematic, because the method they used destroyed the electronic properties of the organic material.

The method, as a principle, is not new: it is being used in printing circuit boards in electronic parts factories, worldwide. It consists of exposing the fullerene thin film to a laser light. The parts that have to remain printed on the surface, are hit by the laser, and those that have to be cleaned out, not. After the laser exposure, the non-imprinted parts are being cleaned  by rinsing the film in a developer solution..

“We have now developed a method that enables us to create patterns in an efficient and gentle way.  With the patterned organic material as a base, we have managed to produce well-functioning transistors,” says Edman.

This production process could also create cheaper solar cells and displays, and give energy a whole new meaning in terms of profitability, which ultimately represents the decision to buy green technology or not.

Graphene is a one-layer carbon material, discovered relatively recent, in 2004. It features a lot of interesting properties, and it can be used in power-saving electronic devices, fact that gives it green credits.

MIT researchers discovered another use to graphene. They discovered that it can successfully be used in frequency multiplying applications. Frequency multiplying is the phenomenon that takes place in every cell phone, TV set or radio device. The problems with frequency multiplying until now were the noise that appeared when you got over a certain threshold, and the complexity of the device doing that.

The new research shows that graphene can do frequency multiplying with absolutely no noise, with only one transistor in circuit. That means more miniaturization and computing speed raise.

In the past few years, graphene was only obtained through the “sticky tape technology”: they touched the adhesive tape with carbon, stuck it to a silicon wafer, and used the one-atom layer’s properties. Now, scientists have learned methods of growing graphene through chemical methods.

So, frequencies of 1000 gigahertz will be easily obtained in the future using graphene’s amazing properties, with no filters or complex circuits at all. The invention will probably impact the development of gold nanoantennas, that were discovered they could harvest nighttime solar energy, by means of infrared spectrum capturing. The technology was not available until now, due to the low frequency limitations of current electronic equipment.

Carbon nanotubes are getting green credits lately, because of their ever new interesting properties. Besides those credits, scientists have discovered other phenomena that could boost wireless communications, also with a green twist.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati have discovered new uses of spinning carbon nanotubes into longer fibers with additional useful properties. Vesselin Shanov and Mark Schultz created the powerful nanotubes, that are stronger than steel at a much lower density.

David Mast, from UC’s McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, made a dipole antenna out of his colleagues’ nanotubes, and replaced his cellphone’s antenna with the newly-invented nanotube. The results were very exciting, since the phone got full signal strength measurements, despite the zero measurement with the antenna missing. In fact, he says the nanotube antenna is so light that the slowest wind can bend it.

The researchers have big plans for their nanotubes, especially in the aeronautic industry, where the weight of the cables counts a lot to the plane’s fuel efficiency.

“Copper wire is a bulk material,” Shanov points out. “With carbon nanotubes, all the atoms are on the surface of these carbon structures and the tubes themselves are hollow, so the CNT thread is small and light.”

“Carbon thread that is a fraction of the weight of current copper conductors and antennas could directly apply and would be significant to aerospace activities — commercial, military and space,” he adds. “On any aircraft, there are about several hundred pounds of copper as cables and wiring.”

Interesting invention – it’s about time someone replaced those heavy centuries old cables that surround us… and that is only the benefit from the user’s point of view. There are several others from an engineer’s eye.

Ever wondered why you have so many gadgets near you, each one of them serving to something unique and totally useful? When you have to use your phone, you have to keep it near, if you use the remote, you have to occupy the other hand, and so on. I know, it may sound natural doing all this, but haven’t you ever thought of a universal remote control with phone, video camera and who knows what other device in it? Sounds interesting, huh?

What would you say if I told you MIT researchers thought recently of a universal gadget having the shape of a soap, that knows your intention and transforms itself into whatever gadget you want, depending on how you hold it in your hand?

They have created a “bar of soap” device, with an LCD screen front and rear. It contains a three-axis accelerometer to measure its motion in 3D, and 72 sensors across its surface to track the position of the user’s fingers.

For example, think about how you hold your remote control and how you hold your phone or camera. There’s a difference, and this device can tell it. Nice stuff.

You may watch a MIT researcher talking about the soap-like device and showing it in action, below:

[via newscientist]

Real-world applications of electronics such as voice and image transmission rarely need the accuracy that the binary system gives them. The miniaturization of electronics brings more and more complication in today’s microchips, that slowly but surely reach their physical limits.

Rice University scientists, led by Prof. Krishna Palem, invented a new type of microchip that just doesn’t work in the classic way. The name of the technology is PCMOS, and instead of offering a clear binary output, it uses a probabilistic logic, a logic developed by Palem and his doctoral student, Lakshmi Chakrapani.

PCMOS is based on the same “Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor” technology, like the transistors used in today’s digital devices. The most interesting fact, though, is that the PCMOS technology can consume 30 times LESS energy than standard CMOS-based chips.

“A significant achievement here is the validation of Rice’s probabilistic analogue to Boolean logic using PCMOS,” said Shekhar Borkar, an Intel Fellow and director of Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Lab. “Coupled with the significant energy and speed advantages that PCMOS offers, this logic will prove extremely important because basic physics dictates that future transistor-based logic will need probabilistic methods.”

Tests involving the use in ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) have been made. ASICS can be found in your car, cellphone, or even in your microwave oven or washing machine. They are specialized in doing something very precise, and they do that task very fast and accurate, in real time.

The PCMOS technology hasn’t been used yet in general computing devices, or in devices that must calculate something exact. They are to be used in cellphones or television sets, where the sound or image quality isn’t ruined by approximations or pixel-level errors.

When you miniaturize a transistor and want to use the same voltage to drive it, the noise level is higher (spurious voltage), so you have to increase the voltage yourself, to override the noise barrier and make that transistor be “heard” properly. The PCMOS technology doesn’t need all that voltage increase, because its output quality requirements aren’t so accurate.

I guess PCMOS will change our gadgets forever. One example would be that instead of charging your phone daily, you’d have to use your charger only once in a few weeks. Let’s not forget the environmental benefits of this action, generally.

The scientists’ research demonstrates a marriage of two emerging fields of research – nanophotonics and nanomechanics, which makes possible the extreme miniaturization of optics and mechanics on a silicon chip.

The energy of light has been harnessed and used in many ways. The “force” of light is different – it is a push or a pull action that causes something to move.

“While the force of light is far too weak for us to feel in everyday life, we have found that it can be harnessed and used at the nanoscale,” said team leader Hong Tang, assistant professor at Yale. “Our work demonstrates the advantage of using nano-objects as “targets” for the force of light — using devices that are a billion-billion times smaller than a space sail, and that match the size of today’s typical transistors.”

Until now light has only been used to maneuver single tiny objects with a focused laser beam — a technique called “optical tweezers.” Postdoctoral scientist and lead author, Mo Li noted, “Instead of moving particles with light, now we integrate everything on a chip and move a semiconductor device.”

“When researchers talk about optical forces, they are generally referring to the radiation pressure light applies in the direction of the flow of light,” said Tang. “The new force we have investigated actually kicks out to the side of that light flow.”

While this new optical force was predicted by several theories, the proof required state-of-the-art nanophotonics to confine light with ultra-high intensity within nanoscale photonic wires. The researchers showed that when the concentrated light was guided through a nanoscale mechanical device, significant light force could be generated — enough, in fact, to operate nanoscale machinery on a silicon chip.

The light force was routed in much the same way electronic wires are laid out on today’s large scale integrated circuits. Because light intensity is much higher when it is guided at the nanoscale, they were able to exploit the force. “We calculate that the illumination we harness is a million times stronger than direct sunlight,” adds Wolfram Pernice, a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow with Tang.

“We create hundreds of devices on a single chip, and all of them work,” says Tang, who attributes this success to a great optical I/O device design provided by their collaborators at the University of Washington.

It took more than 60 years to progress from the first transistors to the speed and power of today’s computers. Creating devices that run solely on light rather than electronics will now begin a similar process of development, according to the authors.

“While this development has brought us a new device concept and a giant step forward in speed, the next developments will be in improving the mechanical aspects of the system. But,” says Tang, “the photon force is with us.”