Fresh Electronics News

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: