Totally bananas

Squeeze the banana to log into this office Wi-Fi ... Ping ping ping ping ping ping ping – banana node

Influential Scientific Minds 2015

Highly Cited Researchers 2015 represents some of world’s most influential scientific minds.

Serious cheating

World's Fastest Rubik's Cube Solving Robot - Now Official Record is 0.900 Seconds

Pratchettium?

Discworld fans stake claim to element 117, 'Octarine', surely, Pratchett petition proposes

Hard stuff

Have scientists really found something harder than diamond?

EUV improves but ...

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is making slow progress, re-kindling hopes it could be ready for production use in the 7nm node.

Self de-icing roads

Toward roads that de-ice themselves

Surface Analysis Meets Microanalysis

Fully integrated EDS Option for the ESCALAB Thermo Scientific 250Xi now available, please contact us for further information.

ICE in Japan

NuFlare Technology installs kSA ICE Tools for MOCVD Reactors.

In Brief

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show included everything from manned drones and Segway robots to personalised coffee foam imprinters. Apparently 700,000 to 1 million unmanned aircraft were expected to be given as gifts in the United States last Christmas. Photo-excited quantum dots have been used in experiments to kill drug resistant bacteria. Congratulations to Curtis Cooper for discovering the world largest prime number, a mere 22, 338, 618 digits.

Large area graphene

The MBE group at The University of Nottingham has successfully produced graphene on large substrate areas by the use of extremely high growth temperatures and SiC substrates. This is a promising approach to allow large scale integration of the new devices being explored using graphene.

Less big spender

The semiconductor industry spent a record $56.4 billion on research and development in 2015, though growth in this spending slowed according to industry analysts IC Insights. Global chip sales came in at about $353.6 billion last year with R&D spending around $56.4 billion. Market leader Intel accounted for 22% of all semiconductor industry R&D spending in 2015. However Intel’s R&D expenditure grew 5% in 2015, well below its 13% average increase per year since 2010.

Too good to be true?

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all the twenty plus judges in the Sanhedrin, then he or she was acquitted. The legislators had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicated the presence of a systemic error even if the nature of the judicial error was not known. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely something had been missed and a mistake was the end result. This “paradox of unanimity" has been explored with probabilistic mathematical analyses in several real world situations. It turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing can be small, so our confidence in unanimity can be ill-founded.

What makes us humans different from other animals?

Perhaps it our ability to make fire, grow food or practice religion. I propose that it is also our desire and need to create rubbish. The earth and the sea are filling up with it. We are currently surrounding the planet with a blanket of the stuff. Some even claim that the internet is full of it. Our actions suggest that, physically and mentally, we just seem to want more of it. Is it time to instill some extra Womble DNA into homo sapiens?

Atoms to products

DARPA Funds Atoms-to-Products Breakthrough - When small is too small