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Chemicals giant Merck KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany) and Plastic Logic GmbH (Dresden, Germany), the developer of the Que e-reader, have announced plans to develop, test and commercialize novel lisicon-type organic semiconductors from Merck in Plastic Logic's displays. The introduction and production of the materials is planned for 2011. Having shown the Que e-reader at the Consumer Electronics Show in January Plastic Logic was originally expected to ship the e-reader in April 2010 but that launch has now slipped to June, it is reported. Merck recently invested in the expansion of its Chilworth Technical Center chemicals research site in Southampton, England, by adding laboratories to intensify and accelerate display material developments based on plastic electronics.

South Korean researchers have recently made a flexible nonvolatile memory based on memristors—fundamental electronic circuit elements discovered in 2008—using thin graphene oxide films. Memristors promise a new type of dense, cheap, and low-power memory and have typically been made using metal oxide thin films. The new graphene oxide devices should be cheaper and simpler to fabricate—they could be printed on rolls of plastic sheets and used in plastic RFID tags or in the wearable electronics of the future. "We think graphene oxide can be a good candidate for next-generation memory," says Sung-Yool Choi, who leads flexible devices research at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea. Choi and his colleagues reported their device last week in Nano Letters.

4 January 2010—Though flexible devices such as roll-up displays have been promised for several years, their commercialization has been stalled by a missing ingredient: a flexible form of flash memory. But researchers at the University of Tokyo have recently developed an organic, floating-gate nonvolatile memory that behaves like flash memory, which may solve that problem. While silicon-based flash memory is fine for the mass data storage found in cellphones, digital music players, and thumb drives, fabricating it requires high processing temperatures, thus ruling out its production on flexible substrates like plastic. Organic semiconductors, however, can be processed at temperatures well below the melting point of most plastics. What's more, "the cost of flash memory is too high to use in applications that require large arrays of memory," says Tsuyoshi Sekitani, an assistant professor in the University of Tokyo's department of electrical and electronic engineering and one of the researchers who developed the new memory. "But we can print our organic memory on flexible substrates and over large areas using inkjet printers. So costs will be low."

Scientists from Bielefeld University have come up with a plastic-head robot called Flobi that can express a number of different emotions, and can have it’s appearance reassembled from male to female (or vice-versa) in a couple of minutes.

You may think that all of those crazy robot competitions that we like to cover are just fun and games, but there’s a serious side. Really, there is. For reals. Mindful of this, ROBO-ONE held the second annual Humanoid Helper Project last weekend, where teleoperated human-sized robots completed (or attempted to complete) three seemingly simple tasks, including pouring liquid from a plastic bottle into a cup, carrying ping-pong balls on a tray, and a 30 minute endurance race. I don’t know about you, but the last two would be a bit of a challenge for me, and they certainly were for the robots:

Icosatetraped does, in fact, mean “twenty-four legged.” I’m not sure how to inject “soft” into that word (icostatetrasquishaped?), but this robot does have 24 soft legs. Or rather, 8 legs are soft (and moving) at any one time, while the other 16 are pressurized to carry the weight of the bot. It can move at about 1 meter per minute, which isn’t especially fast, but who cares, look at all of those little legs go! Made from plastic medical tubing, particle board, a bunch of solenoids, a Mac Mini, and some 24 volt rotary vane compressors salvaged from Gulf War nerve gas detecting equipment, this is about as DIY as it gets, and it’s awesome.