Research

“The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well,” tweeted Elon Musk yesterday. “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” Neuralink is Musk’s electronic brain interface company, developing implants with connections to thousands of in-brain electrodes. Its goal, the company has said, is to enable people with paralysis to “directly use their neural activity to operate ...

Lancaster University is creating a spinout company to develop a universal memory called ULTRARAM. Invented by physics professor Manus Hayne, who collected the award, ULTRARAM combines the non-volatility of a data storage memory, such as flash, with the speed, energy-efficiency and endurance of a working memory, such as DRAM. Shortlist * University of Birmingham – Liquid gallium alloy micro-fluidic mm-Wave ...

Researchers in Italy have made a robot that grows like a plant. Named FiloBot, it is the work of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova. FiloBot it builds its own stem-like body, up to several metres long, curving it permanently in response to light, dark or gravity, and it can also vary ...

Researchers at Chiba University in Japan have uncovered a rule of organic solar cell materials that could guide their development, or at least stop people hunting for the impossible. It is that the exciton binding energy in a material is a quarter of its transport bandgap, regardless of the material. “A previously unpredicted nature of exciton binding energies in organic ...

Imec has come up with a perovskite LED stack emitting light a thousand times brighter than state-of-the-art OLEDs. This result is a pivotal milestone towards a perovskite injection laser, promising applications in image projection, environmental sensing, medical diagnostics, and beyond. The maximum brightness of OLEDs remains limited; just think of trying to read your smartphone screen on a very sunny ...

Kyushu and Kobe Universities have teamed up to hold four electron spins in quantum coherence at room temperature. “Their findings mark a crucial advancement for quantum computing and sensing technologies,” according to Kyushu University. The researchers chose a particular chromophore (a pentacene-based dye molecule) to host electrons whose spins could be entangled, as electrons spins within it can be excited ...

Tokyo Institute of Technology has designed a material for thermo-electric generators without toxic materials such as lead (Pb) or tellurium. To be a good thermo-electric material (TEM), something has to have low thermal conductivity (to prevent heat leaking through) as well as converting heat to electricity effectively. The university cites heavy metal chalcogenides Bi2Te3 and PbTe as high-performance TEMs, while ...

Microsoft and the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have teamed up in a multi-year project to explore material science using AI and super-computing, and discovered a promising solid electrolyte for lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries as a proof-of-concept. The multi-step process used to search for possible electrolytes reduced a list of 32 million inorganic materials to 18 in 80 hours, ...

Belgian research lab Imec is claiming to have created a metal halide perovskite LED stack that emits 1,000x more light “than state-of-the-art OLEDs”, it said. With the assistance of an external laser, the same stack exhibited the electrically-pumped amplified spontaneous emission that would be necessary in a laser. The “result is a milestone towards a perovskite injection laser, promising applications ...

Inorganic perovskite materials are easy to prepare and process, and are suitable for making lasers, according to research at Pusan National University. The perovskite of interest is CsPbBr3, which had to be formed into ‘nano-sheets’ within a particular structure, invented by the Pusan team, to achieve sufficient gain for lasing. Update: Imec announced electrical pumping of a perovskite LED Not ...