Lifeboat Foundation

The first lithography tools were fairly simple, but the technologies that produce today’s chips are among humankind’s most complex inventions.

When we talk about computing these days, we tend to talk about software and the engineers who write it. But we wouldn’t be anywhere without the hardware and the physical sciences that have enabled it to be created—disciplines like optics, materials science, and mechanical engineering. It’s thanks to advances in these areas that we can fabricate the chips on which all the 1

Semiconductor lithography, the manufacturing process responsible for producing computer… More.

Low-cost, flexible displays that use very little energy could be a step closer, thanks to an innovation from the University of Surrey that solves a problem that has plagued source-gated transistors (SGT). The study has been published by IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

Dr. Radu Sporea, project lead from the University of Surrey, said, We used a rapidly emerging semiconductor material called IGZO or indium-gallium-zinc oxide to create the next generation of source-gated transistors. Through nanoscale contact engineering, we obtained transistors that are much more stable with temperature than previous attempts. Device simulations allowed us to understand this effect.

This new design adds temperature stability to SGTs and retains usual benefits like using low power, producing high signal amplification, and being more reliable under different conditions. While source-gated transistors are not mainstream because of a handful of performance limitations, we are steadily chipping away at their shortcomings.

Four volunteers are about to enter a simulated Mars habitat where they’ll spend the next 378 days as part of ongoing preparations for the first crewed mission to the faraway planet.

The specially designed, enclosed habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, will host Alyssa Shannon, Ross Brockwell, Kelly Haston, and Nathan Jones from Sunday, June 25. The team’s experience spans science, engineering, and health, and each member will use their specific skills during their stay.

The mission will be the first of three one-year Mars surface simulations, called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog).

An international team of researchers, led by University of Toronto Engineering Professor Yu Zou, is using electric fields to control the motion of material defects. This work has important implications for improving the properties and manufacturing processes of typically brittle ionic and covalent crystals, including semiconductors—a crystalline material that is a central component of electronic chips used for computers and other modern devices.

In a new study published in Nature Materials, researchers from University of Toronto Engineering, Dalhousie University, Iowa State University and Peking University, present real-time observations of dislocation motion in a single-crystalline zinc sulfide that was controlled using an external electric field.

Continue reading “Using electric fields to control the movement of defects in crystals” »

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Watch this video ad free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/realengineering-the-insane-engineering-of-mri-machines.

Continue reading “The Insane Engineering of MRI Machines” »

It has almost been 20 years since the establishment of the field of two-dimensional (2D) materials with the discovery of unique properties of graphene, a single, atomically thin layer of graphite. The significance of graphene and its one-of-a-kind properties was recognized as early as 2010 when the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to A. Geim and K. Novoselov for their work on graphene. However, graphene has been around for a while, though researchers simply did not realize what it was, or how special it is (often, it was considered annoying dirt on nice, clean surfaces of metals REF). Some scientists even dismissed the idea that 2D materials could exist in our three-dimensional world.

Today, things are different. 2D materials are one of the most exciting and fascinating subjects of study for researchers from many disciplines, including physics, chemistry and engineering. 2D materials are not only interesting from a scientific point of view, they are also extremely interesting for industrial and technological applications, such as touchscreens and batteries.

We are also getting very good at discovering and preparing new 2D materials, and the list of known and available 2D materials is rapidly expanding. The 2D materials family is getting very large and graphene is not alone anymore. Instead, it now has a lot of 2D relatives with different properties and vastly diverse applications, predicted or already achieved.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have identified a microRNA (miRNA) that could promote hair regeneration. This miRNA – miR-218-5p – plays an important role in regulating the pathway involved in follicle regeneration, and could be a candidate for future drug development.

Hair growth depends on the health of dermal papillae (DP) cells, which regulate the hair follicle growth cycle. Current treatments for hair loss can be costly and ineffective, ranging from invasive surgery to chemical treatments that don’t produce the desired result. Recent hair loss research indicates that hair follicles don’t disappear where balding occurs, they just shrink. If DP cells could be replenished at those sites, the thinking goes, then the follicles might recover.

A research team led by Ke Cheng, Randall B. Terry, Jr. Distinguished Professor in Regenerative Medicine at NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine and professor in the NC State/UNC Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, cultured DP cells both alone (2D) and in a 3D spheroid environment. A spheroid is a three-dimensional cellular structure that effectively recreates a cell’s natural microenvironment.

Crystal engineering is a green and convenient approach to designing desirable materials through rational manipulation of intermolecular interactions. We have reported the lesser reported sulfonate–pyridinium intermolecular interaction for the design and synthesis of organic co-crystals with improved features. Here in we report the utilization of the interaction to tune the solid-state luminescence of organic precursor naphthalene disulfonic acid (NDSA-2H). Organic salts of NDSA-2H are synthesized and characterized with three isostructural bipyridyl co-formers: 4-phenylpyridine (4-PhPy), 2-phenylpyridine (2-PhPy) and 2,2′-bipyridine (2,2-bpy). Structural investigation validates aggregation of organic acid and base co-formers through sulfonate–pyridinium synthon and proton transfer between them.

It took Da Vinci 16 years to paint the Mona Lisa. Some say he needed 12 years just to paint her lips.

There is no truth to the rumors that slow Internet was the cause.

But Da Vinci, a polymath who dabbled in botany, engineering, science, sculpture, and geology as well as painting, surely would have appreciated a new text-to-image generative vision transformer developed by Google Research.