Electrical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated the ability to print fully functional and recyclable electronics at sub-micrometer scales. The technique could impact the more than $150 billion electronic display industry and its environmental impact while providing a toehold for U.S. manufacturing to gain traction in a vital and quickly growing industry.
The research appears in the journal Nature Electronics.
"If we want to seriously increase U.S.-based manufacturing in areas dominated by global competitors, we need transformational technologies," said Aaron Franklin, the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Chemistry at Duke.
At 4 degrees Kelvin, most electro-optic materials falter. Nanoelectronics R&D center imec has now successfully engineered thin-film strontium titanate (SrTiO₃) that delivers record electro-optic performance with low optical loss, pointing to shorter, faster building blocks for quantum devices.
Quantum computers and detectors run at temperatures close to absolute zero. In these extreme conditions, even the best room-temperature materials struggle to control light efficiently. This feature is essential to encode, route, and convert information in electro-optic networks, which at room temperature are used in data and telecom applications, but also increasingly for ultra-low temperature quantum links.
Researchers Develop Eye-Tracking System Powered by Blinks
The combo of glasses and contact lenses has big implications for the vision impaired.
By Graham Templeton January 12, 2026
https://www.extremetech.com/science/res ... -by-blinks
Research published last week in Cell Reports Physical Science reports a breakthrough in eye-tracking contact lens technology and general low-power energy harvesting. It's not going to be the basis of a next-gen VR headset for gaming (not unless people decide they're willing to pop in contact lenses just to play Fortnite), but it's still a groundbreaking moment with exciting implications.
The technology combines a simple on-eye detector (hidden within a contact lens) with a pair of glasses that detect the faint signals it generates. The contact lenses have no on-board power source and harvest energy from blinks to function. We'll get into how below, but the upshot is that the system can detect eye movements as small as two degrees with 99% precision.