Biotechnology

Three letters beamed across a lab bench may spark a revolution in wireless communication. The seemingly simple transmission of "IBM" was received by the first working radio chip to be made from the modern wonder material, graphene â€" sheets of carbon, each just one atom thick. Graphene, with its flat, hexagonal lattice, was first isolated a decade ago. It won its discoverers a Nobel prize in physics, in part because its high electrical and thermal conductivity led to broad predictions that it would completely replace silicon transistors, the key component in many electronics. This latest achievement shows that analogue circuits such as radios can indeed make use of the material, potentially leading to cheaper, more efficient wireless devices. Until now, making wireless circuits like the ones in Bluetooth and WiFi chips has not been possible with graphene transistors, because it is too delicate a material and only weakly adheres to t...

AT THE end of March several small bundles of electronics will be ploughed into a field in Cheshire, UK. The sensors will measure soil temperature and moisture content, then transmit those measurements wirelessly to the surface. It is the kind of information farmers around the world need to conserve water while still growing enough crops to feed an expanding population. Currently being tested in lab soil at the University of Manchester, UK, the sensors are cheap to produce, low-power and can be left to gather information in the soil for years without maintenance. They use radio frequency identification to communicate and harvest a small amount of power from an RFID reader mounted on a tractor that collects the data as it moves over each node, says Chuan Wang, who works on the project at the university. Another team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) â€" based in the Midwest's Corn Belt â€" is already well on the way to making ...

Ancient Chinese scrolls may solve a dilemma for futuristic electronics: how to avoid curling. Hanging scrolls traditionally used in Chinese paintings are normally stored rolled up to protect their delicate artwork. But when unrolled, the long sides will curl, potentially causing damage. Tzay-Ming Hong at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and his colleagues decided to investigate curling scrolls after a trip to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, where they talked to art conservationists about ways to use physics to protect hanging scrolls. "Like the mounting masters before them, over the span of more than 2000 years, they did not think this problem was at all solvable," says Hong. The team modelled the problem on computers and with real paper and plastic films. They found that rolling causes the back layer of a scroll to stretch along its length. This means the paper shrinks back when the scroll is laid out flat, causing it to...

Is that a bird or a drone watching you from the telephone wire? A drone with legs can perch just like a bird â€" or land and walk on flat surfaces. Bhargav Gajjar of Vishwa Robotics in Brighton, Massachusetts, designed the legs as an add-on for small US air force drones. Small drones generally lack landing gear. Many rely on a controlled crash-landing, a somewhat crude approach compared with the elegant precision landing of a perching bird. Gajjar studied dozens of bird species and recorded their landings using a high-speed camera. His drone's legs are based on those of the American kestrel. The drone perches in an upright position with a powerful gripping action from an electric motor. Its claws are extremely sharp so that its grip is difficult to break. A remote computer uses footage from a camera fitted to the drone to control flight and get the drone into the correct position for landing. Just like a real bird, the dron...

IF YOU are the kind of person who can afford to be conscientious about what you eat, you are probably torn between rival concerns whenever you visit the supermarket. You want to keep food miles to a minimum, but you also want your greens to taste like they are fresh from the farm. Most of us, however, don't live in areas where those two ambitions are readily compatible. Hence the rising prevalence of refrigerated shipping containers, on the one hand, and pricey urban farmers' markets on the other. Enter the vertical farm. The idea of intensive cultivation inside purpose-built buildings isn't new, but it's now beginning to make economic and environmental sense, particularly given the booming appetites and megacities of Asia (see "Vertical farms sprouting all over the world"). But will such crops attract shoppers? When it comes to farming, we are accustomed to images of rolling fields and golden sunlight. Marke...

WEST GERMANY, 1972. Security services are hunting down the Baader-Meinhof gang. Knowing that the guerillas favour high-rise apartments as safe houses, they gather data on energy use, looking for apartments that consume little or no power most of the time but pay their rent in full. It pays off: one apartment fits the profile and leads to a series of arrests. You don't have to be a police target to be nervous of what your energy use says about you â€" from the hours you keep to your TV tastes. That's why Google's acquisition of a company called Nest rings alarm bells (see "Nest thermostat acquisition is Google's home invasion"). Nest makes smart thermostats that learn your behaviour and adjust the heating accordingly. Convenient and helpful â€" and a potential invasion of privacy. Nest's founders say they have no plans to share data on their customers' behaviour. But few believe that will las...

It may have won its discovers the Nobel prize, but graphene now has a serious rival. "Phosphorene" â€" which has a similar structure to carbon-based graphene but is made of phosphorus atoms â€" is a natural semiconductor and so may be better at turbocharging the next generation of computers. The new material has already been used to make rudimentary transistors. Discovered 10 years ago, graphene is a form of pure carbon just a few atoms thick. This thinness causes electrons to zip across it much faster than they do across silicon, the material at the heart of today's computer chips. So the hope is that graphene chips could eventually replace silicon, leading to much faster computers. But graphene has a fundamental limitation, says Peide Ye at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. It conducts electricity a little too well. Sticky tape By contrast, silicon is a semiconductor, mea...