In brief

TSMC joins ASML's customer co-investment programme for the next generation of lithography tools.

CERN have created the hottest manmade temperature, around 5.5 trillion degrees

Toilet futures

Congratulations to Bill Gates in his desire to really change the world by aiming to reinvent the toilet. And Loughborough University, who won 2nd prize.

Foot pounds of energy?

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a self charging battery unit. By incorporating a piezoelectric material within a Li-ion battery, this generates a charge under mechanical stress and produces a self-charging device. Putting the device on the bottom of a shoe provided a simple route for supplying the mechanical energy for conversion and storage.

Conflict minerals

The Enough Project report looks at the supply chain for leading technology manufacturers and the sources of various materials, including Ta, Sn and W, from the view of human rights abuses. The aim being to eradicate so called 'conflict materials' from their supply chains. Praise is given in the report to both Intel and HP for their efforts whilst at the bottom of the pile is Nintendo, which "has made no known effort to trace or audit its supply chain."

Auto virus

We occasionally experience a car crash, we more often experience a computer crash. However with the modern automobile increasingly resembling a wi-fi connected computer on wheels, and although to date there have been no reports of any car hacking incidents, the vulnerability of this mode of transport to viruses and malicious hacking is clear. Reuters report on the seriousness of the potential threats and the industry's responses.

Olympic gold for RTA Instruments!

University College London has purchased a K-Alpha XPS system, currently being installed by one of the RTA team in the Chemistry Department (a 7 mile cycle ride from the Olympic Park). Serving the needs across a number of different research groups within Chemistry, this is the 5th K-Alpha to be installed in the UK in the last 15 months. A high performance monochromated XPS system that provides easy access for multiple users, the K-Alpha has firmly made its mark in moving XPS into the mainstream of analytical instrumentation.

Ancient classic text analysis

Following the success of the London 2012 Olympic Games we are now enjoying the final few days of the Paralympics. The original Olympic Games date back to 776 BC around the time that the epic poem the Iliad was written. Set in the period of the Trojan wars, the poem includes references to athletic contests associated within funereal games. A recent text analysis of the Iliad and two other ancient classics found that the interactions between the characters in all three myths were consistent with those seen in real-life social networks. The work does not prove that the events described took place, however it does indicate that the overall societies and interactions between characters contained within the stories seem realistic. Interestingly the same could not always be said for the works of more recent fiction that where also analysed in the study.

What would the analysts make of many of the stories contained within today's newspapers?