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Black Phosphorus is the New Silicon

New Chemistry research:  Black phosphorus could help engineers surmount one of the big challenges for future electronics: designing energy-efficient transistors. This is a schematic of the "puckered honeycomb" crystal structure of black phosphorus. Credit: Vahid Tayari/McGill University Published in the journal: Nature Communications , the researchers are utilising black phosphorus as a material to pack more transistors on a chip, making them more energy-efficient.  The work is a result of a multidisciplinary collaboration among Szkopek's nanoelectronics research group, the nanoscience lab of McGill Physics Prof. Guillaume Gervais, and the nanostructures research group of Prof. Richard Martel in Université de Montréal's Department of Chemistry. Reporting on their finds, the scientists at McGill University, have found that when electrons move in a phosphorus transistor, they do so only in two dimensions. This will help in designing new energy-efficient t

Radioactive bananas.... kind of

Fact: The radioactive potassium-40 emits about 15 articles of antimatter a day. So what, exactly, is antimatter? Antimatter is matter consisting of elementary particles which are the antiparticles of those making up normal matter. The person who discovered antimatter was the English Physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984). Dirac derived an equation that explains how really small and really fast things behave, such as electrons travelling near the speed of light. Later, Dirac realised that not only did his equation & theory discover the behaviour of very tiny things, he also discovered something new to the growing world of science; anti-particles. Paul Dirac continued to assert that every particle has a mirror-image particle with nearly identical properties, except for an opposite electrical charge.  Similar to the way protons, neutrons and electrons combine to form atoms and matter, antiprotons, antineutrons and anti-electrons (called positrons) combine to form anti-atoms and an