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A capacitive touch sensor display that provides a more intuitive interface to ease and accelerate user interactions has been developed by VCC. The LED-based CTH series capacitive touch sensor display combines graphic interactive control with colour identification to make the interface more user-friendly.Utilising sensitive capacitive touch sensing technology, the CTH series simplifies designs and offers cost savings by eliminating the need for a traditional switch.The LED display produces a high-optical clarity, and is offered with or without a wide variety of standard graphic overlays and colours. VCC can also develop custom icons to meet most any application requirement. Offered in a wide variety of colours including red, yellow, blue, pure green and white, the LED back-lit CTH series. The robust design has no moving parts, improving reliability and increasing the operational life.Featuring a through hole design, the capacitive touch sensor display is available in one standard size 15x15x11.0mm with an industry standard pitch of 0.100"."Featuring translucent icons illuminated with different coloured LEDs, the user friendly CTH series display offers superior device interaction by communicating a singular action to users such as on/off, alarm status, and more," said Sannah Vinding, Director of Product Development and Marketing at VCC. "The integrated functionality of the compact CTH series capacitive touch sensor display eliminates the need for designing-in a traditional switch. Unlike mechanical membrane switches or mechanical push buttons, capacitive touch keypads have no moving parts so there is nothing to wear out."The CTH series is used in a wide range of applications including appliances, consumer equipment, gaming devices, industrial control displays, media players, medical devices, mobile communication devices, PDAs, point of sale terminals, portable instruments, touch screen monitors and more.Reference:T141AM61STMPE1208SQTRQT1101-ISGAT42QT2100-AUR  

Type 1 diabetes patients may one day be able to monitor their blood glucose levels and even control their insulin infusions via a transparent sensor on a contact lens, a new Oregon State University study suggests.The sensor uses a nanostructured transistor – specifically an amorphous indium gallium oxide field effect transistor, or IGZO FET – that can detect subtle glucose changes in physiological buffer solutions, such as the tear fluid in eyes.Type 1 diabetes, formerly known as juvenile diabetes, can lead to serious health complications unless glucose levels are carefully controlled. Problems can include retinopathy, blindness, neuropathy, kidney and cardiac disease.Researchers in the OSU College of Engineering say sensors they fabricated using the IGZO FET will be able to transmit real-time glucose information to a wearable pump that delivers the hormones needed to regulate blood sugar: insulin and glucagon.The sensor and pump would, in effect, act as an artificial pancreas."We have fully transparent sensors that are working," said Greg Herman, an OSU professor of chemical engineering and corresponding author on this study. "What we want to do next is fully develop the communication aspect, and we want to use the entire contact lens as real estate for sensing and communications electronics."We can integrate an array of sensors into the lens and also test for other things: stress hormones, uric acid, pressure sensing for glaucoma, and things like that. We can monitor many compounds in tears – and since the sensor is transparent, it doesn't obstruct vision; more real estate is available for sensing on the contact lens."The FET's closely packed, hexagonal, nanostructured network resulted from complimentary patterning techniques that have the potential for low-cost fabrication. Those techniques include colloidal nanolithography and electrohydrodynamic printing, or e-jet, which is somewhat like an inkjet printer that creates much finer drop sizes and works with biological materials instead of ink.The findings by postdoctoral scholar Xiaosong Du, visiting scholar Yajuan Li and,Herman were recently published online in the journal Nanoscale. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation provided primary funding for the research.Google has been working on a glucose-monitoring contact lens but its version is not fully transparent."It's an amperometric sensor and you can see the chips—that means it has to be off to the side of the contact lens," Herman said. "Another issue is the signal is dependent on the size of the sensor and you can only make it so small or you won't be able to get a usable signal. With an FET sensor, you can actually make it smaller and enhance the output signal by doing this."This research builds on earlier work by Herman and other OSU engineers that developed a glucose sensor that could be wrapped around a catheter, such as one used to administer insulin from a pump."A lot of type 1 diabetics don't wear a pump," Herman said. "Many are still managing with blood droplets on glucose strips, then using self-injection. Even with the contact lens, someone could still manage their diabetes with self-injection. The sensor could communicate with your phone to warn you if your glucose was high or low."The transparent FET sensors, Herman said, might ultimately be used for cancer detection, by sensing characteristic biomarkers of cancer risk. Their high sensitivity could also measure things such as pulse rate, oxygen levels, and other aspects of health monitoring that require precise control.Reference:OP913SLBPW41NBPW20RFPD204-6C 

It takes a very, very clean room to build a detector sensitive enough to see the light from the beginning of the universe.Work is underway at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory on a new "clean room." The new lab will be specially suited for building parts for ultra-sensitive detectors—such as those to carry out improved X-ray research, or for the South Pole Telescope to search for light from the early days of the universe."This will be a unique facility, and a wonderful investment for the future of the laboratory," said Supratik Guha, who heads the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science User Facility adjacent to where the new space will be located.Clean rooms are a special kind of laboratory that is heavily filtered and cleaned, so that no free-floating particles interfere with delicate work. Take a cube of air one foot on a side: In a normal room in your house or office, this cube contains about one million free-floating particles of dust, dirt and other materials. In the clean room, it's no more than 100.This environment is what you need to build detectors that can detect the tiniest amount of energy striking the surface."Even a few stray specks of dust in the niobium can throw off the design for these detectors," said Marcel Demarteau, who heads the High Energy Physics Division at Argonne and will be a key user of the new lab.One use for such detectors is in the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, one of several telescopes searching for light waves that have traveled throughout the universe since the moments after the Big Bang. This kind of light is called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.Because the light has traveled across space for the 13.8 billion years since the universe began, it has encountered all sorts of obstacles that slightly change its power spectrum—galaxy clusters, patches of dark matter, even our own atmosphere. "We have to correct for these to map the Cosmic Microwave Background signature we're looking for, but these small perturbations themselves hold an enormous amount of very valuable information about the composition of the universe," Demarteau said.  The most sensitive instruments today to find such signals are detectors made from superconductors. Superconductors are extremely sensitive materials that change properties dramatically when their temperature is raised even a tiny bit, and scientists can build components that react to specific frequencies to detect the signature of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The new clean room should allow researchers to build even more sensitive detectors—think of a camera that takes 150-pixel pictures versus one that can take 500,000-pixel images.The same technology will also offer researchers a chance to get better close-ups of the atomic makeup of objects being studied at the Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne where scientists use X-rays to study everything from car fuel injectors to proteins that play roles in disease.The Advanced Photon Source sends beams of high-energy X-rays at a sample of whatever scientists are studying: a new solar cell material, a sample of volcanic glass from Greenland, a protein involved in photosynthesis. The X-rays hit the sample and scatter off in all directions. Very sensitive detectors pick up that scatter and reveal the chemical and atomic layout of the sample. The better the detector, the more information you can get; so Advanced Photon Source scientists are always looking for new ways to improve those detectors."The type of detector we want to build, nobody makes commercially: so we have to build our own," said Thomas Cecil, an engineer with the Advanced Photon Source. The new clean room will allow them to experiment with new kinds of transition edge sensors, which he said they hope could eventually improve the sensitivity by one or even two orders of magnitude compared to traditional silicon-based detectors.Building such technology is an excruciatingly delicate process, in which they lay down multiple coatings just a few nanometers thick—less than a hundredth of the diameter of a human hair—of superconducting materials and etch patterns into them. Then they repeat the process all over again, for up to 15 layers.The detector itself is so precise that it's operated at temperatures colder than outer space to achieve maximum sensitivity. "It's an excellent opportunity for us to push the boundaries of what's possible," Cecil said.Other potential uses, Demarteau said, include quantum computing as well as homeland security: building detectors that can pick out the particular signature of a specific kind of radiation, to detect if terrorists are carrying a dirty bomb made out of, for example, cesium-137. 

A group of researchers at Osaka University, succeeded in producing nanostructured gas sensor devices for detecting volatile organic compounds (VOC) in breath for the purpose of healthcare in time equivalent to or shorter than one tenth of the time required for manufacturing conventional gas sensors. This group improved conventional complicated production methods, developing a simple production method of just sintering substrates applied with materials. This gas sensor's sensing response was comparable to the top-of-the-line sensors reported all over the world.Research leading detection of low concentrations of gas present in exhaled human breath to health checkups and early detection and treatment of serious diseases is being performed. As gas sensors using nanomaterials can detect various gases even at low concentrations, installing such sensors in electronic healthcare devices is sought after, and research and development are being actively conducted.Semiconductor gas sensors detect gas through reduced electrical resistance due to gas molecules attached to the surface of crystalline semiconductor materials. For this, gas sensors need a specific surface area of nanomaterials. In order to use nanomaterials for conventional gas sensors, a complicated flow was necessary, from nanomaterials synthesis to cleansing, uniform dispersion of solvent, applying on substrates, and sintering. Thus, there is a concern that manufacturing technology of such gas sensors requires significant time and labor, increasing cost.A group of researchers led by Assistant Professor Tohru Sugahara (SUGANUMA Lab.) at The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, succeeded in producing nanostructured gas sensor devices for detecting volatile organic compounds (VOC) in breath for the purpose of healthcare in time equivalent to or shorter than one tenth of the time required for manufacturing conventional gas sensors. This group improved conventional complicated production methods, developing a simple production method of just sintering substrates applied with materials. This gas sensor's sensing response was comparable to the top-of-the-line sensors reported all over the world.Since demand in healthcare products is on the rise, there is a lot of activity in research and development of sensors for checking health and disease by examining the gas components of a person's breath. Breathalyzers for finding out who is driving drunk have already been commercialized. Recently, breath sensors for early detection of life-style diseases such as cancer and diabetes have been developed, but most of them are large, bulky and expensive. If gas sensors with high sensitivity are produced thanks to this group's research results, portable breath sensors enabling early detection of diseases will gain popularity.Reference:KGZ10 KGZ10-SPGMS10RVS  

Healthcare practitioners may one day be able to physically screen for breast cancer using pressure-sensitive rubber gloves to detect tumors, owing to a transparent, bendable and sensitive pressure sensor newly developed by Japanese and American teams.Conventional pressure sensors are flexible enough to fit to soft surfaces such as human skin, but they cannot measure pressure changes accurately once they are twisted or wrinkled, making them unsuitable for use on complex and moving surfaces. Additionally, it is difficult to reduce them below 100 micrometers thickness because of limitations in current production methods.To address these issues, an international team of researchers led by Dr. Sungwon Lee and Professor Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering has developed a nanofiber-type pressure sensor that can measure pressure distribution of rounded surfaces such as an inflated balloon and maintain its sensing accuracy even when bent over a radius of 80 micrometers, equivalent to just twice the width of a human hair. The sensor is roughly 8 micrometers thick and can measure the pressure in 144 locations at once.The device demonstrated in this study consists of organic transistors, electronic switches made from carbon and oxygen based organic materials, and a pressure sensitive nanofiber structure. Carbon nanotubes and graphene were added to an elastic polymer to create nanofibers with a diameter of 300 to 700 nanometers, which were then entangled with each other to form a transparent, thin and light porous structure."We've also tested the performance of our pressure sensor with an artificial blood vessel and found that it could detect small pressure changes and speed of pressure propagation," says Lee. He continues, "Flexible electronics have great potential for implantable and wearable devices. I realized that many groups are developing flexible sensors that can measure pressure but none of them are suitable for measuring real objects since they are sensitive to distortion. That was my main motivation and I think we have proposed an effective solution to this problem."Reference:13C5000PA4K19C050PA4KMLH100PGM01B  

As we push the limits of agriculture to feed more people in a warmer world, we do not understand how plants sense temperature.In a surprising turn of events scientists have just learned that plant light sensors also respond to temperature.Plants contain specialized light-sensitive proteins that change shape when they absorb light, much as do the photopigments in the human eye. All plants have three main red-light photoreceptors, called phytochrome A, B and C.As part of an effort to create plants that can tolerate different growth conditions, Richard Vierstra the George and Charmaine Mallinckrodt Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has been developing a library of phytochrome B mutants, including ones that are much more or less sensitive to light than the wild type plant.To better understand their mutant plants, the Vierstra lab shared them with Jorge J. Casal lab in Argentina where doctoral student Martina Legris grew them under a wide variety of carefully controlled conditions."We got 'weird' results that couldn't be explained unless the phytochrome we were working with was sensitive to temperature as well as light," Vierstra said.As the temperature rose, some plants exposed to constant sunlight generate less of the biologically active form of phytochrome B—not more, as you'd expect.At summer temperatures, these plants behave as though they're in dim light even though they're in bright sun.The findings will be published in the Oct. 27 issue of Science, together with a companion paper also on plant temperature sensors by a lab at the University of Cambridge in England.A switch with the jittersVierstra explains that phytochrome proteins work by switching between two forms, called Pr and Pfr.The Pr form is best at absorbing red light, which is plentiful in full sun. When it absorbs red light, phytochrome converts to the Pfr state, which is better at absorbing far-red light that dominates in shade. When the Pfr absorbs far-red light, it switches back to the Pr form.This clever little system is able to detect many different qualities of light, including the light intensity (encoded in the speed at which the molecule bounces from one form to another), and the color of the light (encoded by the ratio of the Pfr form to the Pr form). Intensity tells a seed when to emerge from the soil and color tells the seeding when to grow tall to avoid shade."The beauty of this is you can purify the phytochromes, put them in a test tube and watch them switch forms simply by shining red or far-red light on the solutions," Vierstra said. "So they're not figments of our imagination."An hour glass that runs too fastBut this description leaves out one conversion. Pfr can convert to Pr by absorbing far-red light but also by a process called thermal reversion, which occurs without light.People thought thermal reversion worked like an hour glass, Vierstra said. As soon as the sun set, the hour glass started running, and Pfr started trickling back to the Pr form. The amount of Pfr at the end of the night then told the plant how long the night was.This is important because the length of night varies with the season, especially away from the Equator. So changes in day (and night) length helps plants to tell where they are in the seasonal cycle, which in turn helps them to flower in the right season.Nobody had been able to test the idea that thermal reversion was an hourglass, or timer, however. But as they were tinkering with phytochrome B, the Vierstra lab made phytochrome mutants that were fast reverters and ones that were slow reverters. And these mutants were among those that traveled to Argentina.When they grew the plants, the Casals lab got strange results they could understand only if thermal reversion is much faster than anyone realized; and only if the rate of reversion is very sensitive to temperature. In other words, the only possible interpretationwas that phytochrome B in the wild type (unmodified) plant is a temperature as well as light sensor."The plant is looking for Pfr, which tells it the light is on," said Vierstra. "In sunlight a plant slowly makes more and more Pfr until the reaction that converts Pr to Pfr saturates. But as the temperature rises, the thermal reversion starts running so fast, the plants accumulate relatively little Pfr."You would expect that at higher temperatures the Pr -> Pfr reaction would go faster," Vierstra said, "and it probably does, but thermal reversion goes even faster. It erases the light signal because the reversion reaction is more sensitive to temperature than the one creating the light signal."You can predict what this will do as temperature rises," Vierstra said. "Plants that make lots of Pfr are short, intensely green and happy. But thermal reversion will draw down the Pfr at higher temperatures, so that plants will respond as if they are in the dark (even though they are in the light) and grow tall and leggy.""We don't yet know right now whether it's just phytochrome B that's a temperature sensor," Vierstra said. So right now members of his team, including Research Scientist Sethe Burgie, are trying to get accurate measurement on the other phytochromes. "Once we have this figured out, we could make mutants that are less or more sensitive to temperature by modifying thermal reversion."Coming in from the cold"Phytochromes are the worst to work on," Vierstra said. "You have to spend four days in the dark to purify them. They are incredibly unstable, they are present at very low levels, and they have got all kinds of variants. And unlike most other proteins, their amino-acid sequences also don't tell us how phytochromes work."So when people purify phytochromes, they want to keep the proteins as happy as possible and that means keeping them as cold as possible. All the experiments are done on ice!"And that's why we didn't realize until now that phytochromes could act as temperature sensors!"Reference:LM50BIM3/NOPBLM61CIM3XTMP03FT9Z