University of the West of England (UWE)

Light may be the missing ingredient in making usable quantum silicon computer chips, according to an international study featuring a University of Queensland researcher. The team has engineered a silicon chip that can guide single particles of light – photons – along optical tracks, encoding and processing quantum-bits of information known as ‘qubits’. Professor Timothy

Scientists have developed a photoelectrode that can harvest 85 percent of visible light in a 30 nanometers-thin semiconductor layer between gold layers, converting light energy 11 times more efficiently than previous methods. In the pursuit of realizing a sustainable society, there is an ever-increasing demand to develop revolutionary solar cells or artificial photosynthesis systems that

Harvard scientists have merged stem cell and “organ-on-a-chip” technologies to grow, for the first time, functioning human heart tissue carrying an inherited cardiovascular disease. The research appears to be a big step forward for personalized medicine, because it is working proof that a chunk of tissue containing a patient’s specific genetic disorder can be replicated

It’s a major breakthrough for customers   With gold prices surging in recent years, the semiconductor industry has been increasingly replacing the precious metal with the more affordable copper in the wire bonding process, leading to huge savings in the cost of manufacturing a chip. Wire bonding is the process of providing the electrical connection

Developing the cloak of invisibility would be wonderful, but sometimes simply making an object appear to be something else will do the trick, according to Penn State electrical engineers. “Previous attempts at cloaking using a single metasurface layer were restricted to very small-sized objects,” said Zhi Hao Jiang, postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering, Penn State.

Despite the widespread belief upon their introduction to the market in the early 1980s that CDs would safely store data encoded on them forever, CDs and DVDs are actually susceptible to damage from both normal use and environmental exposure and have an average lifespan of under 10 years. A new optical disc company based in

In addition to being low-cost, these methods can be deployed easily in the field during repairs and retro-fitting. Soiling — the accumulation of dust and sand — on solar power reflectors and photovoltaic cells is one of the main efficiency drags for solar power plants, capable of reducing reflectivity up to 50 percent in 14

The idea of investing both for profit and social good has come a long way in the last few years, but the sector still has enormous potential to grow. The idea of deploying capital not only to generate a profit but to create some social return–“impact investing”–has come a long way in the last few