Robots should be repurposed rather than recycled to combat rising scale of e-waste, scientists warn

The robotics industry should be creating robots that could be reprogrammed and repurposed for other tasks once its life span is completed, researchers have advised.

Diamond continues to shine: New properties discovered in diamond semiconductors

Diamond, often celebrated for its unmatched hardness and transparency, has emerged as an exceptional material for high-power electronics and next-generation quantum optics. Diamond can be engineered to be as electrically conductive as a metal, by introducing impurities such as the element boron. Researchers have now discovered another interesting property in diamonds with added boron, known as boron-doped diamonds. Their findings could pave the way for new types of biomedical and quantum optical devices -- faster, more efficient, and capable of processing information in ways that classical technologies cannot.

A new optical memory platform for super fast calculations

For decades there has been near constant progress in reducing the size, and increasing the performance, of the circuits that power computers and smartphones. But Moore's Law is ending as physical limitations -- such as the number of transistors that can fit on a chip and the heat that results from packing them ever more densely -- are slowing the rate of performance increases. Computing capacity is gradually plateauing, even as artificial intelligence, machine learning and other data-intensive applications demand ever greater computational power.

Engineers develop breakthrough method for aluminum surfaces, enabling advancements in cooling, self-cleaning and anti-icing technologies

An international team of engineers has developed an innovative, scalable method for creating topography-patterned aluminum surfaces, enhancing liquid transport properties critical for applications in electronics cooling, self-cleaning technologies and anti-icing systems.

Researchers unlock new insights into tellurene, paving the way for next-gen electronics

Researchers have published a study describing how quasiparticles called polarons behave in tellurene, a nanomaterial first synthesized in 2017 that is made up of tiny chains of tellurium atoms and has properties useful in sensing, electronic, optical and energy devices.

Revealing the 'true colors' of a single-atom layer of metal alloys

Researchers have demonstrated that the direction of the spin-polarized current can be restricted to only one direction in a single-atom layer of a thallium-lead alloys when irradiated at room temperature. The discovery defies conventions: single-atom layers have been thought to be almost completely transparent, in other words, negligibly absorbing or interacting with light. The one-directional flow of the current observed in this study makes possible functionality beyond ordinary diodes, paving the way for more environmentally friendly data storage, ultra-fine two-dimensional spintronic devices, in the future.

Hidden transport pathways in graphene confirmed, paving the way for next-generation device innovation

Electron transport in bilayer graphene exhibits a pronounced dependence on edge states and a nonlocal transport mechanism, according to a recent study.