NANOWIRING A CIRCUIT
A material that displays exceptionally high conductivity when made into nanowires could help make nanometre-scale electronics a reality.
Charles Lieber and colleagues at Harvard University coated silicon wires 20 nanometres thick with nickel and heated them to 550 °C. The resulting nickel silicide nanowires were found to carry an extremely high current for their cross-sectional area, making them potentially useful as nanoscale conductors. The process, reported in Nature (vol 430, p 61), can also be used to make wires that are part silicon, part nickel silicide, and so could provide a way to interface with today’s silicon chips.
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“I find this result quite amazing,” says Silvano De Franceschi of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “It implies that the dimensions of such structures could potentially be shrunk down to the nanometre scale for use in integrated electronic circuits.”
CELLPHONES TO GET PICTURE RADIO
“Visual radio” is the next service being lined up for cellphone handsets by Finnish phone maker Nokia. The firm will this September launch a clutch of GPRS phones that allow users listening to a built-in FM radio to gain a whole new level of interaction with the DJ.
Software in the new phones will allow users to see news, sport and celebrity pictures relevant to a show’s content in real time, says Gavin Russell, Nokia’s head of multimedia. And the software will allow listeners a “much richer experience than texting” when voting in talk shows or taking part in competitions. Nokia, which is developing the GPRS network technology for the service alongside Hewlett-Packard, is signing up radio stations to the service.
WORLD’S SMALLEST FUEL CELL
A fuel cell no bigger than a mobile phone battery is due to be launched next year. The diminutive power pack will provide enough power to run an MP3 player for 20 hours on just 2 millilitres of methanol fuel. Weighing in at only 8 grams, it will be the world’s smallest fuel cell, its manufacturer Toshiba says.
Methanol is toxic, so the company is developing a refuelling method that does not expose the user to the liquid – probably some kind of replaceable cartridge. Toshiba has not yet decided how much the new cells will cost.
