A team of Harvard researchers showed that the commonly found bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris can use natural conductivity to pull electrons from minerals located remotely in soil and sediment while remaining at the surface, where they absorb the sunlight needed to produce energy.

Led by Peter Girguis, a team of researchers showed that the commonly found bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris can use natural conductivity to pull electrons from minerals located deep in soil and sediment while remaining at the surface, where they absorb the sunlight needed to produce energy.

"When you think about electricity and living organisms, most people default to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but we've long understood that all organisms actually use electrons - what constitutes electricity - to do work," Girguis said. "At the heart of this paper is a process called extracellular electron transfer (EET), which involves moving electrons in and out of cells. What we were able to show is that these microbes take up electricity, which goes into their central metabolism, and we were able to describe some of the systems that are involved in that process."

Scientists from the University of Washington have built the thinnest-known LED that can be used as a source of light energy in electronics. Most consumer electronics use three-dimensional LEDs, but these are 10 to 20 times thicker than the LEDs being developed by the UW.

The UW's LED is made from flat sheets of the molecular semiconductor known as tungsten diselenide, a member of a group of two-dimensional materials that have been recently identified as the thinnest-known semiconductors. Researchers use regular adhesive tape to extract a single sheet of this material from thick, layered pieces in a method inspired by the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to the University of Manchester for isolating one-atom-thick flakes of carbon, called graphene, from a piece of graphite.

In addition to light-emitting applications, this technology could open doors for using light as interconnects to run nano-scale computer chips instead of standard devices that operate off the movement of electrons, or electricity. The latter process creates a lot of heat and wastes power, whereas sending light through a chip to achieve the same purpose would be highly efficient.

Four new ozone-killing gases have been found in the atmosphere. The new gases found, three chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) and one hydro-chlorofluorocarbon (HCFC), seem to be man-made since they where not around until the 1960s.

Lead researcher Dr Johannes Laube from UEA's School of Environmental Sciences said: "Our research has shown four gases that were not around in the atmosphere at all until the 1960s which suggests they are man-made."

"CFCs are the main cause of the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Laws to reduce and phase out CFCs came into force in 1989, followed by a total ban in 2010. This has resulted in successfully reducing the production of many of these compounds on a global scale. However, legislation loopholes still allow some usage for exempted purposes."

"The identification of these four new gases is very worrying as they will contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer. We don't know where the new gases are being emitted from and this should be investigated. Possible sources include feedstock chemicals for insecticide production and solvents for cleaning electronic components."

"What's more, the three CFCs are being destroyed very slowly in the atmosphere - so even if emissions were to stop immediately, they will still be around for many decades to come," he added.