Larry Page announced Google’s new operating structure, under a company called Alphabet:

“As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.

(…) Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President… read full release“

From Science Magazine Science 24 July 2015: Vol. 349 no. 6246 pp. 400-404

“Composite stretchable conducting wires

Think how useful a stretchable electronic “skin” could be. For example you could place it over an aircraft fuselage or a body to create a network of sensors, processors, energy stores, or artificial muscles. But it is difficult to make electronic interconnects and strain sensors that can stretch over such surfaces. Liu et al.created superelastic conducting fibers by depositing carbon nanotube sheets onto a prestretched rubber core (see the Perspective by Ghosh). The nanotubes buckled on relaxation of the core, but continued to coat it fully and could stretch enormously, with relatively little change in resistance.” read more

“The ticking time-bomb at the heart of our big banks’ computer systems” by  Mark Latham

“(…)

Experts have for years been warning that the legacy systems of high street banks – some dating back to the 1960s – are an IT disaster waiting to happen. (…)

Rewind 15 years to RBS’s acquisition of NatWest in 2000. Although the integration of the two banks was lauded by City analysts for huge cost savings, Ian Fraser’s acclaimed account of the demise of RBS Shredded recounts how a decision was taken at an early stage to ditch NatWest’s more advanced computer systems and migrate all of the enlarged group’s IT onto RBS’s smaller IBM-based platform.

(…)

Although RBS has the worst record IT failures, there have also been well-publicised outages at Lloyds, the Cooperative Bank, TSB and the Bank of Scotland.

And the UK’s banks are not alone. (…)  The big players throughout the developed world (…) use computer systems that have been built up and adapted over several decades.” read full article

from gizmag.com

“Researchers from Germany, Japan and the United States have managed to create a tiny, reliable transistor assembled from a single molecule and a dozen additional atoms. The transistor reportedly operates so precisely that it can control the flow of single electrons, paving the way for the next generation of nanomaterials and miniaturized electronics.

(…)

Tiny molecular transistors much smaller than the ones inside our computers (as small as two nanometers) have already been built, but the issue that researchers now face is to find a way to control them in a reliable way. (…)

The transistors of today are built using a top-down approach where bulk silicon is gradually etched into the desired pattern. A molecular transistor, however, must be built from the bottom up, by assembling atoms one by one in a chemistry lab. (…) The device was assembled by taking a crystal of indium arsenide and placing 12 indium atoms laid out in a hexagonal shape on top of it, with a phthalocyanine molecule in the middle.

….” read more