Photolithography is a technique similar to photography used to make very small micron (~0.00004 inch) sized features. Wafers are coated in light sensitive chemicals called photoresist and then certain areas are exposed to light to create a pattern. The processing room is lit with yellow light to avoid exposing the resist. Photolithography is commonly used to make integrated circuits in electronics, but it is also used in basic research in fields such as physics, material science, engineering, and even biology.
Electron beam lithography is a technique used to write nanometer-size features using a narrow beam of electrons to trace out the desired pattern on your sample. This is a form of maskless lithography - custom patterns can be written without the need for a mask. However, ebeam lithography has a low throughput and it is expensive, making it impractical for industrial purposes. This form of lithography is mainly used in research, mask writing, and prototyping, rather than for mass producing devices.
In the past, I have used this system to make nanowires that are less than 100 nm wide. This is 1/1000th the diameter of a human hair!
Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. So, when SIDS still occurred, parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.
Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. (…) Harrington explainedwhat she was told about the cause of her child’s death.
“Nobody could tell me. They just said it’s a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn’t sit well with my scientific brain.”
Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.
"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault,” she said.
(…) As the cause is now known, researchers can turn their attention to a solution. In the next few years, those in the medical community who have studied SIDS will likely work on a screening test to identify babies who are at risk for SIDS and hopefully prevent it altogether.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared telescope studying our solar system, is finally coming to the end of its life. At the end of January 2020, in anticipation of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope launch in 2021, NASA decided to end the telescope’s mission, power down its primary systems, and effectively discontinue further scientific research. The decision marked the conclusion of a 16-year campaign, which was initially intended to only be five years in duration. During its extended lifespan, Spitzer made significant contributions to our knowledge of the universe, including insight into our own origins and the evolution of galaxies.
A completely locked-in patient is able to type out words and short sentences to his family, including what he would like to eat, after being implanted with a device that enables him to control a keyboard with his mind.
The findings, published in Nature Communications,overturn previous assumptions about the communicative abilities of people who have lost all voluntary muscle control, including movement of the eyes or mouth, as well as giving a unique insight into what it’s like to be in a “locked in” state.
Locked-in syndrome – also known as pseudocoma - is a rare condition, where people are conscious and can see, hear, and smell, but are unable to move or speak due to complete paralysis of their voluntary muscles, eg as a result of the progressive neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
