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Door to the world of dreams

01.01.2005

Swiss doctors from the University Hospital in Bern examined a 73-year-old woman who had suffered a stroke. The only thing that the disease affected was that the woman stopped having dreams, and before that she watched them every night, long and very interesting.

Such cases have occurred before, but usually with some side effects (for example, the victim also lost the ability to recognize acquaintances in the face). A study on magnetic resonance imaging showed that part of the visual cortex in the right hemisphere of the brain was affected. Apparently, this area is responsible for the appearance of dreams.

Another observation on a Swiss patient refutes or at least casts doubt on the well-established theory according to which dreams occur during moments of active movement of the eyeballs under the eyelids of the sleeping person.

These movements were preserved in the patient after the stroke, but there were no dreams. However, about three months after the stroke, the woman's dreams reappeared, but they are rare and their intensity is reduced. As is known, other brain functions after a stroke are also often restored, although not completely, due to the transfer of functions to the remaining healthy parts of the brain.

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Efficient molecular diodes 06.07.2017

An international team of scientists from the United States, Ireland and Singapore, led by Professor Christian A. Nijhuis of the National University of Singapore, has for the first time been able to create efficient molecular rectifier diodes.

Diodes are electronic elements that have different conductivity depending on the direction in which current flows through them. Rectifier diodes convert AC to DC; their main characteristic is the rectification factor K, equal to the ratio of the values of the alternating voltage at the input and the rectified voltage at the output.

For modern industrial silicon rectifier diodes, K values vary from 105 to 108. However, for molecular diodes - molecular-scale elements that could theoretically be used to create superminiature electronic devices - this figure has so far been, at best, 103, which is clearly not enough.

Now Nijuys and his colleagues have succeeded in creating a molecular diode with a rectification factor of 6.3x105. These are macroscale tunnel transitions based on a single layer of molecular diodes. The number of molecules conducting current in these junctions varies with bias polarity, thereby multiplying the internal rectification factor of an individual molecule by three orders of magnitude.

"This exceeds the theoretical limit," commented Professor Enrique del Barco of the University of Central Florida, one of the paper's co-authors. "Now we have a molecular diode comparable in performance to silicon. What was a theoretical scientific model is moving into the plane of commercial possibilities.

However, for now, molecular diodes, apparently, will not replace completely electronic ones - but they may be able to replace them in some areas. One of their advantages is low cost and ease of production, because molecular diodes can be synthesized directly in the laboratory.

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