Breakthrough in nanotube transistors

Carbon nanotubes are a promising material for making display control circuits because they're more efficient than silicon and can be arrayed on flexible surfaces, says Technology Review.

Until recently, though, making nanotubes into transistors has been a painstaking process. Now researchers at the University of Southern California have demonstrated large, functional arrays of transistors made using simple methods from batches of carbon nanotubes that are relatively impure.

Though these transistors were made using simple processes at room temperature, their performance is good enough to drive display pixels.

After several years of boom, the question of what comes after social platforms is no longer so remote, states Guardian.co.uk.

Speaking at an event at the Said Business School in Oxford, Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and made early investments in Facebook and LinkedIn, noted: "With digital technology there is a tendency to underestimate when things are getting mature, but to understand the financial and technological situation it is really important."

Then he floated a bigger and more daring possibility - that the development stage of the Internet itself has come to an end. "See, we went from the development of telecommunication to the Internet and from the Internet to social networking. Maybe there is no innovation left any more, and we have to look for it in a completely different direction."

Before the advent of laparoscopic or keyhole surgery in the 70s, operations such as a stomach bypass or gall bladder removal required large incisions and long periods for recovery, writes ZDNet.

The next chapter further minimises the invasiveness of surgical procedures via robots that are millimetres in size that infiltrate our bodies through the ears, eyes and lungs, to take tissue samples, deliver drugs, or install medical devices.

Brad Nelson, a roboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, recently told New Scientist: “It's not impossible to think of this happening in five years. I'm convinced it's going to get there.”