The way to prevent intra-operative awareness has been paved by joint efforts of medical science and physics. Intra-operative awareness, familiarized through some thriller movies, is a unique physiological phenomenon which causes the patient under general anesthesia to recover consciousness during surgery. The patient experiencing intra-operative awareness may feel the pain or pressure of surgery, hear conversations, or feel as if he cannot breathe, but may be unable to communicate any distress because he has been given a paralytic or muscle relaxant.Professor Seunghwan Kim (Department of Physi..

Spin-valve devices are a key component of a magnetoresistive random access memory. Mr. Woo Youn Kim and Professor Kwang Soo Kim of Department of Chemistry of POSTECH predicted supermagnetoresistance in a graphene nanoribbon device, the article of which has appeared in Nature Nanotech (3, 408-412, 2008). The reported graphene nanoribbon spin-valve device shows extremely large magnetoresistance (ten thousand times larger than that of conventional devices), which promises high speed access, and good sensitivity. The striking enhancement originates from the peculiar symmetry of band structures of ..

Revolutionary plastic memory devices developedRecent increases in demand for mobile devices have stimulated the development of nonvolatile memory devices with high performance. These nonvolatile memory devices are unpowered computer memory devices such as USB flash drives. However, with recent developments will soon see foldable electronic newspapers, books, magazines, and even wearable computers. Professor Moonhor Ree (Department of Chemistry) and Professor Ohyun Kim (Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering) research team, in their paper entitled, “Novel Digital Nonvolatile ..

POSTECH celebrated its 20th Anniversary on December 3rd, 2006.On December 3rd, 1986 established as Korea’s first research-oriented science and technology university, POSTECH began its journey to become one of the world’s leading research-oriented universities.After a short history of only 12 years, POSTECH topped the list of Asia’s leading science and technology universities by Hong Kong based Asiaweek in 1998 and the Times Higher Education Supplement ranked POSTECH 25th (3rd in Asia) in citations per faculty.The main driving force of POSTECH’s rise to the top was the f..

It is well known that plants can fix carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugar. In plant cells, the chloroplast is responsible for fixing carbon dioxide into sugar. Thus chloroplasts as the factory for sugar production play essential roles not only for plants themselves but also for most of living organisms on Earth. However, chloroplasts are not just carbon dioxide fixing factory but also responsible for producing a large number of chemical compounds that are essential for plant growth and development. Interestingly, chloroplasts in plant cells are thought to be originated from ancestral cyanobacterium..

Lord Rayleigh wrote about the two-dimensional whispering gallery mode (WGM) in 1910 after a visit to the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral in London. The whispering cave mode (WCM) is a threedimensional (3D) effect?a toroid with circular helix symmetry?which recent studies have shown can be used to create photonic-quantum-ring (PQR) lasers that emit in the blue-violet part of the spectrum. A research team at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH, Pohang, Korea) first created 3D WCM lasers that emit in the infrared and red part of the spectrum. To achieve this, professor O&rsquo..

Professor Seung-Hoon Jhi and Ph.D. Candidate Seon-Myeong Choi, both of the Department of Physics, in their study of metal doped graphene nanoribbons, discovered that the adsorbed metal atoms form atomic chains which can be used as reagents to identify the edge atomic structures of the graphene nanoribbons and also as gate-driven spin valves to control the spin current in graphene nanoribbons. Graphene, the basic structural element of all graphitic materials including graphite, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes, is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeyco..

Professor Kilwon Cho and Doctor Ho Sun Lim of the Department of Chemical Engineering discovered the smart surface that can switch reversibly from extreme water-hating (superhydrophobic) to dramatic water-loving (superhydrophilic) via exposure to ultraviolet or visible light (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2006, 128, 14458). Recently, this smart surface was introduced with the subject, “Self-Cleaning Materials: Lotus Leaf-Inspired Nanotechnology” in a hot issue of materials science field in Scientific American. The lotus grows in muddy water, but its leaves, when they emerge, are seemingly neve..

Nowadays the term of ‘nano’, which means 10-9 as the SI prefix, is commonly mentioned in the media. Usually, a human hair is taken as a means for lifelike recognition of 1 nanometer. One nanometer is 1/100,000 of a hair, which is too small to observe through optical microscope. When we consider that 1 nm is 3 or 4 atomic scale at the most, similar to DNA with the size of 2 nm, its very small size is true to nature for us. Hence, to control an individual atom and to reveal the mystery of the DNA of human body, ‘nanotechnology’ has been attracting great attention as one o..

First drug delivery method developed for mitochondrial diseasesWhat do Huntington’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease (familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; the disease the physicist Stephen Hawking is suffering from) and Alzheimer’s disease have in common? The answer is mitochondria; these diseases are now called mitochondrial diseases.These incurable degenerative neurological or neuromuscular diseases, together with apoptosis (programmed cell death) and aging, are understood to occur largely at mitochondria sites. What then are mitochondria? Mitochondria (plural of mitochondr..