Already being intensely studied as an agent for cleaning up toxic waste, a strain of bacteria has now surprised researchers with its ability to build conducting nanowires.

The long, very thin wires are unprecedented in biological systems, says the microbiologist who discovered the bacteria and the wires' conductivity. They completely change science's understanding of how microbes handle electrons, he said.

Derek Lovley and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass.) reported observing and measuring the conductivity of long wires, 3 to 5 nanometers in diameter, emanating from the Geobacter bacteria.

How long does it take an electron to jump from one atom to another? According to a team of physicists in Germany and Spain, the answer is just 320 attoseconds. They came to this conclusion using X-ray pulses to watch an electron as it travelled from a sulphur atom to the surface of ruthenium metal. The process was one of the fastest ever studied (Nature 436 373).

Altair's Developments Pave the Way for a New Generation of Rechargeable Batteries

RENO, NV. – February 10, 2005 – Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) announced today that it has achieved a breakthrough in Lithium Ion battery electrode materials, which will enable a new generation of rechargeable battery to be introduced into the marketplace, as well as create new markets for rechargeable batteries. These new materials allow rechargeable batteries to be manufactured that have three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries at the same price and with recharge times measured in a few minutes rather than hours.

In its tireless efforts to create smaller and more powerful structures for integrated circuits, Infineon Technologies AG has achieved a further breakthrough in its Munich laboratories: researchers here have constructed the world's smallest nanotube transistor, with a channel length of only 18 nm - the most advanced transistors currently in production are almost four times this size. To build their nanotransistor, the researchers grew carbon nanotubes, each one measuring only 0.7 to 1.1 nm in diameter, in a controlled process.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a technique that uses surface chemistry to make tinier and more effective p-n junctions in silicon-based semiconductors. The method could permit the semiconductor industry to significantly extend the life of current ion-implantation technology for making transistors, thereby avoiding the implementation of difficult and costly alternatives.

To make faster silicon-based transistors, scientists much shrink the active region in p-n junctions while increasing the concentration of electrically active dopant. Currently about 25 nanometers thick, these active regions must decrease to about 10 nanometers, or roughly 40 atoms deep, for next-generation devices.

The current craze in lithography is immersion technology.

But researchers from the University of Arizona have put a new twist on the technology, by devising so-called "solid immersion." In a paper at the Bacus Symposium for Photomask Technology, the University of Arizona Wednesday (Sept. 15) is expected to describe the means of enabling maskless lithography, by using "solid immersion lens nano-probes."

Preparing for the next wave of devices, IBM Corp. has quietly added immersion lithography to its chip-manufacturing roadmap.

"It's on our roadmap," said Jim Ryan, Distinguished Engineer from IBM and director of the company's R&D efforts at Albany NanoTech. "It's safe to say it's on everybody's roadmap."

Back in 2003 IBM planned to extend 193-nm tools to the 65-nm node, thereby pushing out 157-nm scanners to the 45-nm node. For the 32-nm node, IBM has been evaluating several next-generation lithography technologies (NGL), such as electron-beam projection (EPL), extreme ultraviolet (EUV), and others (see May 28, 2003 story).

Scientists from IBM's Zürich Research Laboratory and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have found a way to alter a single atom.

The researchers used a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope and a voltage pulse to place an electron on an individual gold atom, then remove the electron. Regular atoms are neutral, while ions -- atoms with more or fewer electrons -- carry a charge.

The gold atom, positioned on an ultrathin film of sodium chloride, remained stable during the operation, despite the change in charge. The gold atom was kept stable by small changes in the positions of nearby atoms in the film.

A significant breakthrough in the development of the highly prized semiconductor gallium nitride as a building block for nanotechnology has been achieved by a team of scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley.

For the first time ever, the researchers have been able control the direction in which a gallium nitride nanowire grows. Growth direction is critical to determining the wire's electrical and thermal conductivity and other important properties.

"Our results will come as a surprise to those who have said that growth direction can't be controlled, that you get what you get when you grow semiconductor nanowires," says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and a professor with UC Berkeley's Chemistry Department, who led the research.

Methods and apparatus for distributing power and data to devices coupled to the human body are described. The human body is used as a conductive medium, e.g., a bus, over which power and/or data is distributed. Power is distributed by coupling a power source to the human body via a first set of electrodes. One or more devise to be powered, e.g., peripheral devices, are also coupled to the human body via additional sets of electrodes. The devices may be, e.g., a speaker, display, watch, keyboard, etc. A pulsed DC signal or AC signal may be used as the power source. By using multiple power supply signals of differing frequencies, different devices can be selectively powered. Digital data and/or other information signals, e.g., audio signals, can be modulated on the power signal using frequency and/or amplitude modulation techniques.

Wouldn’t you like to be able to read off the screen of your laptop in direct sunlight? Your mobile phone battery to last much, much longer? Or your next flat screen TV to be less expensive, much flatter, and even flexible? Thanks to a breakthrough technology called Organic Displays, this could soon be reality.

Although the technology behind Organic LED (OLED) displays is pure chemistry, the applications are much more everyday - mobile telephone and television screens, laptop and stereo displays, car navigation systems, or even billboards.

Physicists in Germany and the US have made a single-electron transistor that operates using a nanometre-scale vibrating arm. The device was built using a simple two-step process and does not need to be operated at cryogenic temperatures like previous devices of its kind (Appl. Phys. Lett. 84 4632). It could have a wide variety of practical applications and could also be used to study fundamental physics.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology on Wednesday (May 5) approved funding for development of step-and-flash imprint lithography (S-FIL), with $17.6 million of NIST funds going to a group of companies working on the imprint approach developed at Molecular Imprints Inc. (MII), based here.

The NIST funds will be combined with $19.1 million in cost-sharing funds contributed by MII and a group of partners that have worked with MII over the past two years, including KLA-Tencor, Photronics, Motorola Labs and the University of Texas at Austin. The co-founders of MII — chief technology officer S.V. Sreenivasan and Grant Willson — are professors of mechanical engineering and chemistry, respectively, at the University of Texas.

Motorola Labs (Tempe, Ariz.) has worked with MII to develop templates and other supporting technology needed to make imprint lithography practical.

The NIST grant will support work needed to extend the imprint lithography approach to leading-edge semiconductors, where alignment between the mask layers is a critical challenge. Early MII customers have used the systems for compound semiconductors, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices and other applications where alignment demands are somewhat less precise than in leading-edge CMOS devices.

The traditional scaling of semiconductor manufacturing processes died somewhere between the 130- and 90-nanometer nodes, Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief technology officer, told an industry forum.

Speaking at this week's International Electronics Forum here, Meyerson repeated earlier comments on scaling. This time, he also referred to the end of conventional CMOS technology, which he portrayed as headed in the same direction as bipolar logic in the mid-1980s.

Engineers in the US have made the first high-speed transistor from a carbon nanotube. Peter Burke and colleagues at the University of California at Irvine showed that their device - which consists of a single-walled carbon nanotube sandwiched between two gold electrodes - operates at extremely fast microwave frequencies. The result is an important step in the effort to develop nanoelectronic components that could be used to replace silicon in a range of electronic applications (S Li et al. 2004 Nano Lett. 4 753).