A group of scientists has succeeded in creating the world’s first transistor made from a single molecule.

The group included researchers from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.

The team, including Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Yale, showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

The researchers were able to manipulate the molecule’s different energy states depending on the voltage they applied to it through the contacts.

By manipulating the energy states, they were able to control the current passing through the molecule.

“It’s like rolling a ball up and over a hill, where the ball represents electrical current and the height of the hill represents the molecule’s different energy states,” Reed said.

“We were able to adjust the height of the hill, allowing current to get through when it was low, and stopping the current when it was high,” he added.

In this way, the team was able to use the molecule in much the same way as regular transistors are used.

Being able to fabricate the electrical contacts on such small scales, identifying the ideal molecules to use, and figuring out where to place them and how to connect them to the contacts were also key components of the discovery.

“There were a lot of technological advances and understanding we built up over many years to make this happen,” Reed said.

There is a lot of interest in using molecules in computer circuits because traditional transistors are not feasible at such small scales.

But Reed stressed that this is strictly a scientific breakthrough and that practical applications such as smaller and faster “molecular computers”—if possible at all—are many decades away.

“We’re not about to create the next generation of integrated circuits,” he said. “But after many years of work gearing up to this, we have fulfilled a decade-long quest and shown that molecules can act as transistors,” he added.

ANI

Maker Media has just published a new book called Make: Electronics, by Charles Platt, and it's the best electronics primer I've ever come across (admittedly, I'm the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Charles' friend, but I really do think it's the best).

Here's what Gareth Branwyn (the book's editor) said about it:

I'm thrilled to announce our latest offering from O'Reilly/Make: Books, Make: Electronics, by Charles Platt. This is a book that we've wanted to do for awhile. Many of us at Maker Media have had an interaction that goes something like this: You're at a talk, Maker Faire, or elsewhere, and someone spirits you aside, like they're going to confess to a petty crime or some marital indiscretion. What they want to whisper sheepishly into your ear is that they love MAKE, all of the excitement they see over open source electronics, and the cool kits we sell in the Maker Shed, but they have NO IDEA how electronics work, and the "beginner" books and resources they look at online zoom quickly over their heads and frustrate their efforts to learn. Ultimately, they find themselves too embarrassed to admit their lack of high-tech smarts or to ask questions (which is why they've taken you behind a dumpster to confess their ignorance).

So we decided to make it our mission to create a book that would patiently guide readers into the world of electronics in a way that was fun, clear-spoken, graphical, and experiential. Charles dubbed it "learning by discovery." He has you experimenting with parts right out of the gate, licking batteries (really), breaking and frying stuff, and then you learn what happened and why, the theories behind the parts and processes, and how to do the experiment correctly. For all of those would-be makers and wireheads who've been looking for a book that will finally let them in on all the fun, we made this one for you!

In 340+ pages, Make: Electronics takes you from the most basic aspects of electronic components and theory to essential techniques, such as soldering and using a multimeter, gathering basic tools and setting up a workshop, all the way up to working with integrated circuits, microcontrollers, and building sophisticated devices such as robots. The book is full-color, with hundreds of photos, illustrations, schematics, even fun cartoons. Charles Platt, being the true Renaissance man that he is, did all of this himself. So the book has something of a charming, handmade feel to it.

To give you an idea of what the book feels like, we've put together this 40-page PDF. It contains the cover, table of contents, two complete projects from the book, and the index.

The deluxe kit, shown above, has many of the tools you'll need to make the projects in the book.

Make: Electronics

Please feel free to buy me one for Christmas!

Next time you compliment a woman at a party that’s she glowing, it may literally be so. Two London-based designers have created a dress embroidered with 24,000 full color LEDs.

The ‘Galaxy Dress’ claims to be the largest wearable display in the world and it will be the centerpiece of an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

“We used the smallest full-color LEDs, flat like paper, and measuring only 2 by 2 mm,” say designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz in an e-mail. “The circuits are extra-thin, flexible and hand-embroidered on a layer of silk in a way that gives it stretch so the LED fabric can move like normal fabric with lightness and fluidity.” The duo run an interactive clothing company called CuteCircuit.

Beyond the LEDs themselves, the Galaxy Dress is crafted in a way that should make the pickiest seamstresses proud.

To diffuse the LED light, the dress has four layers of silk chiffon and a pleated silk organza crinoline skirt. The extra-thin electronics allow the dress to follow the body shape closely like normal fabric.

Instead of having one large and heavy battery, the dress is designed to run on many tiny iPod batteries hiding in the crinoline, says Rosella. “They are not visible or uncomfortable,” she says.

With the batteries, the Galaxy Dress wearer can walk around — all lit up — for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.

The areas without LEDs are decorated with more than 4,000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals that range in color from clear to bright pink.  “The dress looks good even when it is switched off,” say the designers.

So far, the dress hasn’t been worn by any real woman. It went straight from the fitting model to the museum.

See a video of the LED Dress that, according to the designers, consumes about the same electricity as two household bulbs.

Photos: J.B. Spector/the Museum of Science and Industry

Nick Weldin has been teaching our workshops in the UK since we met him in 2007 and even back then, we wanted to allow him to share his passion and skills with a broader audience. We decided to make a book, and not only that but a book on the internet! No official publishing company, all creative commons images from the community and many many contributors. A true team effort that has been 2 years in the making.

We had the great pleasure of having Crystal Campbell join us for a few months in the autumn of 2008 and help make this a truly visual piece of work and Ben Barker took over this summer to tweak it, help with the editing yet again and with the intricacies of Lulu and now , right on time for Christmas, it’s out!

Tinkering with Arduino is a cousin of Getting Started with Arduino, inspired by the pdf Massimo wrote some years ago, going through the basics of how to use Arduino, but from Nick’s perspective, adding details about how electricity works, how programming works all in a beautiful visual package we are extremely proud of. 90 pages of beautifully illustrated works from Crystal but also with some of the original drawings from Elisa Canducci.

A part of what we’re trying to work out with our work in education since 2007 and hand in hand with the development of the TinkerKit is the language of technology and how it can be opened up to a broader audience and be presented in a friendly way that isn’t off putting. We think that Tinkering with Arduino is a step in that direction along with the great books like Making Things Talk, and other more advanced books like Programming for Interactivity.

If you’re out of ideas for this Christmas, well then give it a go!

By Katie Scott |14 October 2009

A shape-shifting robot that can shrink itself to squeeze through cracks has been designed by researchers from iRobot (the makers of Roomba) and the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The robot uses the "jamming of a granular medium to achieve locomotion". Jamming is a mechanism that allows material to change from a solid state to a liquid-like state, says the team. In this robot design, a mixture of air and loosely packed particles are held within an elastic skin. By pulling out the air, the team can change the shape and size of the robot and also make it move.

The video above is the explanation the team presented at IEEE IROS 2009, which took place in St Louis this week.

Follow Wired.co.uk on Twitter at twitter.com/wireduk

Online editing by Holden Frith

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Tech Know: Musical computer code

It might just be the most conceptually complex way of making music that modern man has yet devised.

But that is the challenge of live coding - the process of writing computer code, in real time, to compose and play music or design animations.

"It's not just a passive process, not just someone creating sounds, which is the problem with electronic music - because people don't really see what it is that the musicians are doing," says Dave Griffiths.

Dave is a live coder and a performer in a night of live coding held in a south London pub, organised by the collective Toplap.

"Live coding brings the audience closer; they can see that you're making something in front of them," he says.

The furious coding is also projected onto a screen for the audience, making the programming as much - or more - of the performance as the music it codes for.

Bug bare

Live coding eschews the normal route of developing computer code, which starts with writing a program in a "high-level" language - one that looks not too far removed from English.

Then, the programmer compiles it, meaning it is converted by another program into a language not too far removed from the 1s and 0s of computing.

The purist's version of live coding starts with a blank screen

Then they run it. If anything it should go wrong - and anyone who has ever done any programming will know how frequent this is - they get nothing out.

A crash. Epic fail.

Because the software that live coders use is designed for a compile-free, real-time use, the performers face this prospect much less often.

But it does happen, Dave tells me. "That's what keeps it exciting," he says.

A crash means a deadly uncomfortable silence in front of an expectant audience, which on the night includes quite a few people who have simply stumbled upstairs into the pub's function room to see what live coding is.

Jamming frequency

Up first is Chris McCormick, whose performance is a world premiere.

Live coding has its own, custom-made programming languages, some of which are as simple as a 1970s computer interface, with lines of code entered onto a black screen.

Others might be more visual, with musical directions encoded as shapes that are arranged freehand on a screen.

"It might not be any easier to understand but it's visually more interesting than just text," Dave says.

Some software packages for live coding are more visual than others

"But then there's also something nice about the purity of just having lines of code."

Chris is a fan of the more visual software, but he follows the live coding purist's tradition of starting off with a blank screen.

As he adds shapes corresponding to sounds, filling them in with numbers that finely tune their timbre or frequency, his stage fright is not in evidence.

He says that live coding is like building the computer programs that are commonly used to make electronic music; it is "one more level of abstraction" from the music itself.

"Making boring techno music is really easy with modern tools," he says, "but with live coding, boring techno is much harder."

As if to prove the point, the performances after Chris's held no full-fledged, boring techno.

Dave and his collaborator Alex McLean perform a live-coding duet, each of them running independent programs.

They listen to each other's output and work separately but together in a way that is conceptually not so different from two saxophonists "trading fours".

Engaging

Matthew Yee-King and his partner Nick Collins - known by his stage name Click - have opted to stray from standard live coding this evening, instead performing their "algorhythmic choreography".

Instead of code entered on the screen resulting in sound, it results in Click performing dance moves. It's less high-tech and more conceptual performance art.

But they share the others' passion about what it is that live coding taps into.

Live coders can "jam" together as with traditional instruments

"I've done all sorts of things with a computer and a stage, but [live coding] feels like it's really native to computing," says Matthew.

"It's like a virtuosic exploration of the guts of the machine, in the same way that a piano virtuoso engages with the machine they're using.

"You're deeply engaging with the machine in a way that you don't if you're using someone's ready-made software."

And this seems to be the point; no one has come expecting to make or to hear heroically composed, massively melodic and moving music.

It's more an exposition of what can be done starting from absolutely nothing with a novel, stripped-down set of sonic tools.

Dave sums it up: "It's such a new thing, and we don't know if we're any good at it - it may well be that a new generation comes along and just blows us away".

The group is looking into doing a tour of sorts by playing in planetariums across the country, with the first in September at Plymouth Planetarium.