Flexible Screens and Bendable Smartphones: the Science behind this Emerging Technology

Bendable Smartphone of the future. Image credit to Smarttechnology

Bendable Iphone of the future. Image credit to Prowl Newspaper

I had my first mobile phone in 2007-one Nokia 2310. Then it was like one precious jewel-honestly if you give me that phone now, I'll throw it into the closet and flush it away-and I could remember that I played all the ring tunes on it over and over again, and also listened to news and jamz on radio stations with it. It was just so sweet. I used to admire the screen and always changed the theme colour-from blue to other colour mixtures I can't remember. But looking back and making comparison with the type of screens we have on phones now, I made a joke that the display of those old mobile phones and that of the current day call-only dumbphones are just films of groundnut oil on water; but that's a joke anyway.

There has been rapid transformation in phones display and hardware from what was obtained back then to things like LCD (liquid crystal display), AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode); and now the current buzz: flexible display, bendable screens and bendable phones. These new trending buzzwords in the smartphone tech world are not really new ( I mean in terms of the basic, fundamental scientific principles behind them).

Back in secondary school (high school) and in the first year of university when we did the basic sciences, we were taught that metals and semiconductors like silicon are electrical conductors while non metals like plastic and rubber are electrical insulators, meaning that plastics and the likes do not allow current to flow

Flexible Display. Image credit to Treehugger

through them. However, I would say that information was limited in scope maybe to accommodate the curriculum meant for such level. But as far back as the 1970s, three scientists, devised ways through which non metals like rubber and plastics when subjected to certain conditions conducted electricity like metals; this work led to the concept of polymeric conductivity (polymers-composed of thousands of monomers, if you remember your secondary school Chemistry-conducting electricity). The research was so phenomenal and filled with endless prospects for the field of material science and engineering that the three scientists, Professors Alan J Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa behind it were awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for it. 

The area of polymeric conductivity in material science has so much expanded since 1970s, giving rise to possible applications in the future such as flexible electronics (electronic devises whose electricity conducting parts are made of polymeric conductors and hence allowing you to bend them, unlike metals used in current devices).

In fact, one of the expectations I had for the Samsung Galaxy S5 before its launch was it was going to come with a flexible screen display, and I was mildly disappointed initially because it fell short of that expectation despite all the rumours. But that expectation was not met because of one of the biggest challenges facing the industrial application of polymeric conductivity; and that was what took away that mild disappointment (though some other expectations I had for the smartphone, and which are extremely feasible, were not met with, but their analysis is not the focus of this blog).

According to a new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists from Stanford Univetsity and the University of California Berkeley and led by Professor Andrew Spakowitz, these conductive polymers at the molecular level exhibit what they termed structural inhomogeneity. In other words, plastic conductors conduct electricity at different rates in their various parts at the molecular level such that bending or flexing them significantly alters the rate of current flow, reducing the electrical conductivity (and I now understood why the Galaxy S5 probably fell short of my flexible screen expectation--some work still needs to be done). Professor Andrew Spakowitz and his team I guess are working to find solutions to this current flow-impeding structural inhomogeneity; and their success, which is on the high side of prospects, will definitely make our dreams of having bending smartphones and tablets and other electronic devices in our hands come true because, for one thing among so many things,
I will no longer panic if my bendable smartphone falls from my hand.

The Greatest Labs of our Time

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN Lab. Image credit to The Telegraph

When we hear of great scientific and technological inventions and discoveries, do we actually take a moment to imagine the centres that served as the factory, the machine house for these ingenious, world-changing productions: works that weave their webs of applications into so many areas that have been vital to our continued smart adaptation to this our world (I mean the ability to bend the course of the process of natural selection to our desired trajectory)? These are great halls that house great men and women during their days of tireless labour and sleepless nights of waiting for Eureka moments.

It just occurred to me that these bedrocks of history making deserve some recognition (because most people are fairly or not even aware of them); and though there are so many, I have selected one for now because of the magnitude of its structure, the large number of science and tech experts  working in it and the unprecedented level of collaboration it has (in terms of funding, rapport with universities and other research centres, and political commitment), and of course the quality of basic and applied research works it has churned out and it's still producing.

And I'm talking about the largest particle Physics lab on the planet-the CERN Laboratory. Founded officially in 1954 (with origin dating back to 1949) after what was known as the CERN convention by 12 European countries under the auspices of the European Organisation Nuclear Research, the Lab is located at the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. Its name CERN is derived from the acronym Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or European Council for Nuclear Research, and it is sometimes referred to as the European Laboratory of Particle Physics.

In terms of collaboration, CERN Lab is run by 21 member European countries and observed by some non member countries from around the world, who all contribute to the funding of the lab's programmes; over 600 universities and institutes around the world use the lab's facilities; and about 10,000 scientists from over 113 countries come to CERN Lab for reseach.

CERN Lab currently employs about 2400 people. The lab majorly specializes in particle physics and has built some of the world's largest particle accelerators and detectors (gigantic machines used to accelerate subatomic particles like protons to near the speed of light and detect resultant particles from such collision).

ATLAS Particle Detector of the LHC. Image credit to CERN Lab

This great research lab has given birth to so many exceptional pieces of research. In 1989, the British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (www.) which on 30th April, 1993 was released to the public for free; and we all can agree how the web, free, has revolutionized every area of our human endeavour.

Though still in the experimental stages, physicists, biologists, doctors and other multidisciplinary experts are working at the CERN Lab to detail the biological effects of antiproton (a subatomic particle with all the properties of a proton but with opposite charge

Antiproton Cell Experiment. Image credit to CERN Lab

and magnetic field direction, and so when it collides with a proton, they both destroy each other, releasing only a burst of energy) in the hope of using it in cancer therapy. What I see here is the prospect of reducing damage to healthy cells due to the scattering of protons when it collides with the nuclei of atoms of cells in the current cancer radiotherapy; the potential of antiprotons colliding with cancer cells and being destroyed together with the nuclei of atoms of these cells, releasing only bursts of energy and no other particle which can damage nearby healthy cells is a great insight being brewed inside the CERN Lab.

And last year, Professor Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics  with Professor Francois Englert for their over 50-year-old theoretical physics research on the Higgs Boson particle (the particle that gives all matter their mass). This Nobel Prize was awarded to them because of the confirmation of this particle's existence after 50 years it was proposed; and this confirmation was done at the CERN Laboratory. The Lab's particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, spanning 27 km in length), worth $10 billion through its two detectors named ATLAS and CMS detected the particle; over 4000 scientists worked tirelessly to make this possible. I'm not a physicist but the existence of this particle and its confirmation holds untold potential for mankind which may not be in sight now: when protons were first discovered, nobody thought they would find applications in medicine, agriculture and so on. So, time will tell how great the real-world impact of this great fundamental scientific discovery will be.

Google launches smart contact lens

The year 2014 will be the opening door for wearable smart devices, many tech analysts and experts say. Prequel to this, tech giants like Samsung and Sony launched their smartwatches last year. Samsung before that, introduced some compatible wearable accessories such as the S Band and Heart Rate Monitor for their galaxy S4 last year June.

Google Smart contact lens. Image credited to Muktware

Google has not been left out in this elite group as they released the beta version of their Google Glass, a smart eye glass that functions by responding to vocal commands and which will be out in the market probably before this year runs out. And now it has taken its prowess in the wearable technology sector to another level when it announced a few days ago that it was testing a prototype smart contact lens.

The smart contact lens has the healthcare sector as its main focus of application according to the BBC. The smart contact lens will use a tiny wireless chip and glucose sensor embedded in two layers of lens materials to measure and record per second glucose levels in tears; and an integrated tiny LED (light emitting diode) light would signal to indicate when glucose levels have passed certain healthy benchmarks, especially in diabetic individuals.

Google Glass. Image credited to Wikimedia

One in ten people of the world's population will have diabetes by 2035 according to the estimates from the International Diabetes Federation. And with this potential technology many catastrophic incidents from sudden rise or drops in glucose levels will be averted as the suffering individuals would have a portable real-time per second reading of their glucose level because this smart contact lens will work with an application on smartphones and tablets; this also means that these individuals' physicians will constantly monitor their patients via smartphones and tablets.

Though this project is still in the experimental stages, Google said its working with the US Food and Drug Administration and other partners (to develop apps) to make it available in the market.

IBM Set to Take Humanoid Computing to the next Level

IBM Watson Supercomputer.

IBM BlueGeneP Supercomputer.

IBM Watson Supercomputer.

 Computing technology firm, IBM are making plans to explore the virtually limitless potential of its supercomputer named Watson after its former president Thomas Watson and which was built in 2005 by the firm's DeepQA project. The supercomputer defeated its human rivals in the America's Favorite Quiz Show, Jeopardy TV game show; and the supercomputer has been shown to compute substantial chunks of information at a rate faster than the human brain.

According to a report on the BBC news site, IBM has earmarked about $1 billion to create a new division solely for the supercomputer. The company aims to harness the supercomputer's capabilities in mimicking how people think (using natural language and analytics) and understanding language complexities and learning from  experience, to develop faster and smarter software solutions for businesses and individuals.

Emerging area of immediate application, according to expert opinion, is healthcare where medical professionals will likely access the supercomputer's gigantic cloud computing database, Softlayer, using smartphones that are linked wirelessly to their diagnostic equipment.

A non-invasive, bloodless malaria test developed.

Researchers at the Rice University, Texas USA, led by Dmitri O. Lapotko, have designed a rapid non-invasive test for malaria, which uses harmless laser pulses, and neither requires drawing blood sample with a needle and syringe nor any reagent. Studies were first carried out on mice; and clinical trials on humans would likely have started .

The research work published on 27th November, 2013 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailed how the scientists harnessed the high optical absorbance of hemozoin, the breakdown product of haemoglobin digestion by the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum in red blood cells, to safe laser beams to generate a picosecond-long localized vapour nanobubble around the hemozoin nanoparticles. These vapour nanobubbles called Hemozoin-generated Vapour Nanobubbles carry an acoustic (sound) signature that can be detected by a nanosensor called optical detector. The overall procedure involved attaching a fibre optic probe to the earlobe of a mouse; this probe sent laser pulses through the skin of the earlobe, and in 20 seconds the nanosensor recorded the acoustic signature obtained, detecting the presence of malaria parasite even when only one red blood cell in a million was infected, with no false positives according to the technology's inventor, Dmitri O. Lapotko.

And according to a report on the New York Times, the technology can be powered by a car battery through a device that is tough enough to work in hot and dusty rural areas , which could transform malaria diagnosis especially in endemic areas of the world by effortlessly screening one person every 20 seconds for less than half a dollar ( N75.00 in Nigeria) down from the current finger-pricking 15 minute-long test which costs more than a dollar.

Cambridge University scientists print new retinal cells

A group of scientists from University of Cambridge John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair, the Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, and the Eye Department, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, has, for the first time, successfully printed two types of retinal cells from adult rats--ganglion cells and glial cells--using a piezoelectric inkjet printer, a type 3-D printing technique known as bioprinting. These two cells, while functioning to relay information from the eye to certain areas of the brain, support and protect the retinal neurons, the cones and rods. The research published on 17th December, 2013 in the journal Biofabrication showed that the printed retinal cells were able to retain their healthy growth and survival in culture

. The scientists who stated that the work was still preliminary hope to carry out more extensive research to perfect their findings, including extending the inkjet bioprinting technology to the light-sensitive photoreceptor cells of the retina responsible for sight, before beginning any human clinical trials that will aim to treat blindness resulting from damage to the nerve cells of the retina.