Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Image via Wikipedia Solid-state lighting pioneers long have held that replacing the inefficient Edison light bulb with more efficient solid-state light-emitting devices (LEDs) would lower electrical usage worldwide, not only “greenly” decreasing the need for new power plants but even permitting some to be decommissioned. But, in a paper published in the Journal of Physics

Building transient electronics is usually about doing something to make them stop working: blast them with light, soak them with acid, dunk them in water. Professor Leon Bellan’s idea is to dissolve them with neglect: Stop applying heat, and they come apart. Using silver nanowires embedded in a polymer that dissolves in water below 32

Image via Wikipedia Chemists are usually asked to invent a solution, but without considering hazardous by-products. Green chemists now are doing both with success, but will it take regulations to enforce the approach broadly? Back in the days when better living through chemistry was a promise, not a bitter irony, nylon stockings replaced silk, refrigerators

It is perfectly legal for companies to sit on patents and wait for others to create before either suing the creator or charging licensing fees. Today it is perfectly legal for companies to buy and sell the rights to unlimited numbers of ideas, a company is not required to have any interest in making these

Image via CrunchBase Social Networking in Web 2.0: Plaxo & LinkedIn In my last post, I discussed the origins of social networking online, beginning with CompuServe, Prodigy, the Well, then the rise of AOL, Geocities and Yahoo Groups. Next began the era of “spam-based” networks of which Plaxo (founded in 2002) was the king.  Co-founded by

Penn State scientists have discovered a novel drug target and have rescued functional deficits in human nerve cells derived from patients with Rett Syndrome, a severe form of autism-spectrum disorder. The research, led by Gong Chen, professor of biology and the Verne M. Willaman Chair in Life Sciences at Penn State, could lead to a

A two-dimensional material developed by Bayreuth physicist Prof. Dr. Axel Enders together with international partners could revolutionize electronics. Semiconductors that are as thin as an atom are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Bayreuth physicist Prof. Dr. Axel Enders, together with partners in Poland and the US, has developed a two-dimensional material that could

The first electrical enhancement of sweet potatoes Already ranked by some as number one in nutrition among all vegetables, the traditional sweet potato can be nutritionally supercharged, literally, with a simple, inexpensive electric current treatment that increases its content of healthful polyphenols or antioxidants by 60 percent, scientists said here today. Their report on the

Could potentially be applied on a mass scale Researchers at Purdue University in the U.S. have developed a new method of harvesting vast amounts of energy from waste heat. Using glass fibers dipped in a solution containing nanocrystals of lead telluride, the team led by Dr. Yue Wu is engineering a highly flexible thermoelectric system