News by Subject Technology & Engineering

An international team of researchers, affiliated with South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has unveiled that brittle diamonds can be bent and stretched elastically when made into ultrafine needles.

New biotechnology reported in the journal Nature Communications could make testing potential medicine for pulmonary fibrosis, one of the most common and serious forms of lung disease, quicker and less expensive. The innovation, lung-on-a-chip technology, relies on the same technology used to print electronic chips, photolithography.

A new experimental discovery, led by researchers at the University of Minnesota, demonstrates that the chemical element ruthenium (Ru) is the fourth single element to have unique magnetic properties at room temperature. The discovery could be used to improve sensors, devices in the computer memory and logic industry, or other devices using magnetic materials.

In an experiment described in Physical Review Letters, a single photon aligned the spins of 6,000 electrons in only 50 picoseconds. The result offers prospects for technological applications in the electronic component industry.

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Technische Universität Dresden demonstrate the possibility of using ultrastable film formation to improve the performance of state-of-the-art OLEDs. In their joint paper published in Science Advances the researchers show in a detailed study significant increases of efficiency and operational stability (> 15 percent for both parameters and all cases, significantly higher for individual samples) are achieved for four different phosphorescent emitters.

The increase of skyscrapers in a city resembles the development of some living systems. Spanish researchers have created an evolutionary genetic algorithm that, on the basis of the historical and economic data of an urban area, can predict what its skyline could look like in the coming years. The method has been applied successfully to the thriving Minato Ward, in Tokyo.