Kavli Institute of Nanoscience researchers have developed a way to use water to quickly transfer layers from one surface to another by exploiting the fact that different materials have different hydrophilicity, a discovery that could lead to lower manufacturing costs for nanoelectronics. The researchers, led by Kavli’s Gregory Schneider and Cees Dekker, developed a solid hydrophobic layer on top of a silicon wafer by dipping it in a solution containing a hydrophobic polymer. They then submerged the wafer in water, which wedged the layers off the silicon base. Intermolecular forces between the graphene and silicon provide a stable attachment and eliminate the need for glue, Dekker says. Repeating the technique several times would allow graphene layers to be built up into a complex nanoelectronic structure. “A [three-dimensional] microelectrode can be designed, layer by layer, using our ‘wedging’ transfer technique,” Schneider says.
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Two hundred biologists and computer scientists gathered at the first-ever Sage Congress have proposed creating an open source model that standardizes and links together thousands of scientific databases worldwide. In the future, such a system could give researchers and scientists access to thousands of raw genetic data samples that could then be connected and used to explain how a disease functions. Sage Bionetworks, a new nonprofit that organized the conference, also plans to build systems that can mimic the human body and help researchers analyze complex interactions among networks of genes. Merck has agreed to pass on some technology from the disbanded Rosetta project, which resulted in one of the fastest supercomputers in the drug industry. Open source technology will likely be used, and projects such as Science Commons are working to overcome the legal, financial, and infrastructural barriers to sharing studies and data.
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Microsoft Live Labs researchers have developed Pivot, a tool designed to visually organize large data sets. Pivot presents data in the form of several images accompanied by textual data. Users can zoom into the images to study individual pieces of data, or zoom out to see items grouped according to certain criteria. Data collections can contain a few images with static data attached, or they can be large and connected to a feed of changing data. Pivot is based on Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large amounts of visual information. Users can make their own collections of data by converting images to the Deep Zoom format used by Seadragon, and annotate them using a format based on extensible markup language. Pivot also could provide a better way to sort through Internet search results, because users could sort through thousands of results visually, instead of just looking a list of the top 10 search results.
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