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Plasma etching (using an ionized gas to carve tiny components on silicon wafers) has long enabled the perpetuation of Moore's Law -- the observation that the number of transistors that can be squeezed into an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Without the compensating capabilities of plasma etching, Moore's Law would have faltered around 1980 with transistor sizes at about 1 micron (the diameter of a human hair is approximately 40-50 microns wide). Today, etch compensation helps create devices that are smaller than 20 nanometers (1,000 times smaller than a micron).

Electricity controls much of the human body: consider the electrical firing of neurons and the current transmitted by the heart. Yet historically the electrodes that have been used in medicine to monitor and regulate essential activity have been biologically incompatible because they are stiff, big and water-sensitive. Now scientists are setting new standards with their designs for flexible, stretchable and waterproof circuits and electrodes that mimic the properties of human tissues

Bridgelux says it has developed a cheaper way to produce LED bulbs. LED Chips, on the Cheap LED bulbs have long been lauded as an energy-efficient alternative to incandescent bulbs.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Just when it began to appear that scientists had found a viable way around the problem of the blurring that occurs when using masks to create smaller and smaller silicon wafers for computer chips, a previous study on beam splitting optics showed that the new approach would not work, at least as it has thus far been proposed. A group of researchers explain why in a paper in New Journal of Physics.