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Over the past decade, wearable electronics—especially those with health care applications—have become increasingly popular, but researchers are still figuring out the best way to power them. Traditional batteries are currently the most popular answer, but they are often too rigid and don't last very long with continuous use. Wireless power transfer techniques offer another solution, but those systems have limited range and are not portable. Binghamton University Professor Seokheun "Sean" Choi, Assistant Professor Anwar Elhadad, Ph.D. '24, and Ph.D. student Yang "Lexi" Gao have developed a new method to pull moisture from the air and turn that water into electricity. In a paper recently published in the journal Small, the Binghamton team outlined their paper-based wearable device that would provide sustained high-efficiency power output through moisture capture.

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Imagine a sweater that powers electronics to monitor your health or charge your mobile phone while running. This development faces challenges because of the lack of materials that both conduct electricity stably and are well suited for textiles. Now a research group, led by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, presents an ordinary silk thread, coated with a conductive plastic material, that shows promising properties for turning textiles into electricity generators. Thermoelectric textiles convert temperature differences, for example between our bodies and the surrounding air, into an electrical potential. This technology can be of great benefit in our everyday lives and in society. Connected to a sensor, the textiles can power these devices without the need for batteries. These sensors can be used to monitor our movements or measure our heartbeat. Since the textiles must be worn close to the body, the materials used in them must meet high demands on safety and flexibility. The silk thread that the researchers tested has a coating made of a conducting polymer. It is a plastic material with a chemical structure that makes the material electrically conductive and well adapted to textiles.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools have proved to be highly effective in tackling various tasks that entail analyzing data and making accurate predictions. Despite their advantages, these tools have significant computational demands, and when running on existing processing units, they can consume a lot of energy. Researchers at Peking University and other institutes in China recently developed a highly promising tensor processing unit (TPU) based on carbon nanotubes that could be used to run AI algorithms more energy-efficiently. This carbon nanotube-based tensor processing chip, presented in a paper in Nature Electronics, could be a key breakthrough on the path towards developing next-generation chips.

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Solar energy is critical for a clean-energy future. Traditionally, solar energy is harvested using silicon—the same semiconductor material used in everyday electronic devices. But silicon solar panels have drawbacks: for instance, they're expensive and hard to mount on curved surfaces. Researchers have developed alternative materials for solar-energy harvesting to solve such shortcomings. Among the most promising of these are called "organic" semiconductors, carbon-based semiconductors that are Earth-abundant, cheaper and environmentally friendly. "They can potentially lower the production cost for solar panels because these materials can be coated on arbitrary surfaces using solution-based methods—just like how we paint a wall," said Wai-Lun Chan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas.

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If there's one thing we humans are good at, it's producing heat: significant amounts, and in many cases most of the energy we generate and put into our systems we lose as heat, whether it be our appliances, our transportation, our factories, even our electrical grid. "Waste heat is everywhere," said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Bolin Liao, who specializes in thermal science and renewable energy. "Our power plants, our car exhaust pipes—there are so many places where we create excess heat waste." For the moment, we're fairly limited as to how we can make the most out of this dissipating heat. But Liao and UCSB colleagues, alongside collaborators from Ohio State University and University of Hong Kong, are making headway toward putting that heat to use, with a first-time comprehensive characterization of the thermoelectric properties of high-quality cadmium arsenide thin films.

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Professor Kyung-In Jang's research team from the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering at DGIST has succeeded in developing a highly stable stretchable electronic device, which overcomes the mechanical limitations of conventional inorganic materials and enhances their stretchability and durability. In collaboration with Professor Taeho Park's team from the Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH, the research team has developed a stretchable hybrid polymer and applied it to electronic devices, enabling them to operate stably even under deformation or external impacts. This technology is expected to be used in various industries, such as displays, health care, and wearables. The results of this research have been published online in ACS Nano. The "stretchable electronic device" technology is a promising technology applicable to various industries, such as displays, wearables, and health care. However, when subjected to deformation, such as stretching and bending, or external impacts, maintaining stable electrical functionality in these components becomes challenging.

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In a study published in Nature Communications, a team of scientists led by Rice University's Qimiao Si predicts the existence of flat electronic bands at the Fermi level, a finding that could enable new forms of quantum computing and electronic devices. Quantum materials are governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, where electrons occupy unique energy states. These states form a ladder with the highest rung called the Fermi energy. Electrons, being charged, repel each other and move in correlated ways. Si's team found that electron interactions can create new flat bands at the Fermi level, enhancing their importance.

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The safety and efficiency of a large, complex nuclear reactor can be enhanced by hardware as simple as a tiny sensor that monitors a cooling system. That's why researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are working to make those basic sensors more accurate by pairing them with electronics that can withstand the intense radiation inside a reactor. The ORNL research team recently met with unexpectedly high success using a gallium nitride semiconductor for sensor electronics. A transistor made with the material maintained operations near the core of a nuclear reactor operated by research partner The Ohio State University. Gallium nitride, a wide-bandgap semiconductor, had previously been tested against the ionizing radiation encountered when rockets hurtle through space. Devices with wide-bandgap semiconductors can operate at much higher frequencies, temperatures and irradiation rates. But gallium nitride had not faced the even more intense radiation of neutron bombardment.

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A research team has significantly enhanced the data storage capacity of ferroelectric memory devices. By utilizing hafnia-based ferroelectric materials and an innovative device structure, their findings, published on June 7 in the journal Science Advances, mark a substantial advancement in memory technology. The team was led by Professor Jang-Sik Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Semiconductor Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). With the exponential growth in data production and processing due to advancements in electronics and artificial intelligence (AI), the importance of data storage technologies has surged. NAND flash memory, one of the most prevalent technologies for mass data storage, can store more data in the same area by stacking cells in a three-dimensional structure rather than a planar one. However, this approach relies on charge traps to store data, which results in higher operating voltages and slower speeds.

There’s a century-old battery technology that’s taking the grid-scale market by storm. Based on water, virtually fireproof, easy to recycle, and cheap at scale, flow batteries could be the wave of the future.

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The electric guitar has been a core element of popular music for much of the past century. Pickups are the components that turn vibrations from the strings into electricity for sound and can be seen as the "heart" of the instrument. Electric guitarists have long known that the magnetic force from pickups affects the quality of their sound and how smoothly the sound transitions, known as timbre. Takuto Yudasaka, visiting scholar at McGill University and researcher at Yamaha, present their work on the physics behind electric guitar pickups Wednesday, May 15, at 10:30 a.m. EDT as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, held May 13–17 at the Shaw Center located in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. "In electric guitars, the vibration of a magnetized string generates an electric current in the pickup coil," said Yudasaka. "This current is very weak, but by winding the coil thousands of times, more signal can be detected."

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Electron–hole bilayers are semiconductor structures in which electrons and holes—positively charged electron vacancies—are separated into two distinct layers. These structures can host unusual phases of matter owing to the presence of both attraction between opposite charges and repulsion between like charges. However, most studies have focused only on the scenario in which the electron density is equal to the hole density. Now theoretical work by David Dai and Liang Fu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has explored the imbalanced case in which this electron–hole density ratio is 2:1 [1]. The researchers’ findings suggest that such an electron–hole bilayer has a remarkably rich phase diagram. The imbalanced case is of particular interest for two key reasons. First, the presence of a net charge density causes the Coulomb interaction between the charges to become stronger than their other interactions, favoring unconventional phases in which the charges are strongly coupled to one another. Second, this setup could facilitate the formation of exotic particles called trions, made of two electrons in the electron layer bound to one hole in the hole layer.

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Researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough in developing a small-scale energy storage device capable of stretching, twisting, folding, and wrinkling. Their study is published in the journal npj Flexible Electronics. The advent of wearable technology has brought with it a pressing need for energy storage solutions that can keep pace with the flexibility and stretchability of soft electronic devices. Micro supercapacitors (MSCs) have emerged as a promising candidate for deformable energy storage, due to high-power density, rapid charging, and long cycle life. However, the fabrication of interdigitated electrode patterns capable of maintaining the energy storage performance under repeated stretching and twisting has remained a great challenge, because brittle materials like gold (Au) have been commonly used as an electrode. Meanwhile, though eutectic gallium-indium liquid metal (EGaIn) has high conductivity and deformability, a fine patterning of EGaIn is extremely difficult due to very high surface tension of EGaIn.

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As the Internet of Things connects more devices into a collective network—even single-use sensors like food packaging, agriculture or "smart bandages"—the need for biodegradable electronics grows increasingly urgent. Binghamton University Professor Seokheun "Sean" Choi sought to investigate his ideas about integrated papertronics. A new research paper published in Advanced Sustainable Systems reports his latest findings—and they could revolutionize how we monitor the world around us. "The biggest problem with paper for electronics is that the paper is highly porous and rough," said Choi, a faculty member in the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "These properties are very helpful for paperfluidics, because those devices require high surface area and roughness—but for electronics, they pose a critical challenge."