Connections by the billion

Figures from the ITU say that during 2015 there will be 3.2 billion people using the internet and 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide.

My Thesis in 180 seconds

The "My Thesis in 180 seconds" idea is being extended into EPFL; doctoral students have three minutes to explain their research in front of a jury and a non-specialist audience.

Car chat

Driver decisions and thus automotive safety would be enhanced if vehicles could “talk” to each other and exchange information in real time. In the US, moves are underway to promote vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications in a push for better road safety and to help facilitate self driving cars. Legal issues and allocating a suitable, secure, wireless spectrum for the V2V communications are non trivial matters to be dealt with.

Bouncing weeds

Dandelions deliver a desirable product: rubber. This is why the robust and undemanding plants have become the focus of attention of the rubber-producing industry. But how is rubber, contained in the plant’s white milky fluid, actually formed? A team of scientists has now identified proteins, which play a key role in the production of rubber in the plant. Thus a biotechnological production of rubber comes closer.

Read in the dark

Researchers have developed a thin, clear nanocellulose paper made out of wood flour and infused it with biocompatible quantum dots — tiny, semiconducting crystals — made out of zinc and selenium. The paper glowed at room temperature and could be rolled and unrolled without cracking.

Sleeping beauties

Like Sleeping Beauty, some research lies dormant for decades, Indiana University study finds.

Top chip makers

Six top 20 semiconductor suppliers show >20% growth

Aggressive ties?

Men who wear red clothes send out a signal that they are angry and aggressive, in much the same way as if their face had reddened, suggests research. When 50 male and 50 female volunteers were shown images of men in different coloured t-shirts, they rated those wearing red as more aggressive and angry than those in blue or grey.

This device will self destruct in ...

Where do electronics go when they die? Most devices are laid to eternal rest in landfills. But what if they just dissolved away, or broke down to their molecular components so that the material could be recycled? University of Illinois researchers have developed heat-triggered self-destructing electronic devices, a step toward greatly reducing electronic waste and boosting sustainability in device manufacturing.

Small diode, big performance

Researchers have designed a new technique to create a single-molecule diode, and, in doing so, they have developed molecular diodes that perform 50 times better than all prior designs.

Big physics costs big numbers

As the large hadron collider (LHC) powers up after two years of maintenance and upgrading, I thought that I would re-visit the Standard Model, Higgs Bosons and Supersymmetry. With echoes back to Lord Palmerston and the Schleswig-Holstein question, finding, understanding and then retaining meaningful explanations about why the LHC and Higgs et al are so important to us all quickly becomes somewhat complex and confused. Popularizing intrinsically difficult to understand concepts is not easy but as the LHC has an annual budget of around $1 billion the job needs doing. Rephrasing a more recent UK Prime Minister, perhaps rarely have so few spent so much to discover something so important yet been unable to communicate its importance to so many.