Researchers from North Carolina State University have created stretchable, transparent conductors that work because of the structures' "nano-accordion" design. The conductors could be used in a wide variety of applications, such as flexible electronics, stretchable displays or wearable sensors.

Led by Young Duck Kim, a postdoctoral research scientist in James Hone's group at Columbia Engineering, a team of scientists from Columbia, Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) reported today that they have demonstrated—for the first time—an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon, as a filament. They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate, and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up. The study, "Bright visible light emission from graphene," is published in the Advance Online Publication on Nature Nanotechnology's website on June 15.

Phase change random access memory (PRAM) is one of the strongest candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory for flexible and wearable electronics. In order to be used as a core memory for flexible devices, the most important issue is reducing high operating current. The effective solution is to decrease cell size in sub-micron region as in commercialized conventional PRAM. However, the scaling to nano-dimension on flexible substrates is extremely difficult due to soft nature and photolithographic limits on plastics, thus practical flexible PRAM has not been realized yet.

A simple way to turn carbon nanotubes into valuable graphene nanoribbons may be to grind them, according to research led by Rice University.

The first graphene quantum dot light-emitting diodes (GQD-LEDs), fabricated by using high-quantum-yield graphene quantum dots through graphite intercalation compounds, exhibit luminance in excess of 1,000 cd/m2.

Researchers in UC's Department of Cancer Biology are collaborating with material scientists from the University of Houston to create and use nanotubes to capture and understand the regulation of proteins involved in a variety of diseases including certain cancers, cardiovascular diseases and obesity.