Sensors can monitor production processes, unmask tiny cracks in aircraft hulls and determine the amount of laundry in a washing machine. In future, they will also be used in the human body and raise the alarm in the event of high pressure in the eye, bladder or brain.

Like crowds of people, microscopic particles can act in concert under the right conditions. By exposing crowd behaviour at the atomic scale, scientists discover new states and properties of matter.

Silicon is an important material for electronic chips and processors, but it has a big drawback: as an indirect semiconductor, it hardly emits any light.

Trio Smartcal has a new role as the distributor for Agilent Technologies for Qld, NSW, ACT, Vic and Tas. Also covered will be defence accounts in SA. Trio Smartcal will sell Agilent’s ‘basic instrument’ range of general-purpose test and measurement products.

For electrical charges racing through an atom-thick sheet of graphene, occasional hills and valleys are no big deal, but the potholes - single-atom defects in the crystal - they're killers, according to researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Startronics has merged with Sanmina’s Australian operations. Startronics is owned by Pacific Equity Partners and Allen Capital Private Equity and is a leader in electronics manufacturing in Australia. Sanmina is a global electronics manufacturer listed on NASDAQ.

Elgato Systems has announced a distribution agreement with Conexus, a specialist distributor of multimedia technologies for the Macintosh.

Fluke Australia has announced three new distribution agreements. The newly formed Testing Equipment Solutions (TES) has been appointed the distributor of Fluke precision measurement instruments in Queensland, while NSW distribution will be handled by IPI. Triple Point Calibration (TPC) will service Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Nextreme has developed a miniature, thin film thermoelectric generator (TEG) that converts heat directly into electricity.

The ‘2007 Asia–Pacific Customer Survey of the Electronic Connector Industry,’ conducted by market researchers Bishop & Associates, has placed ERNI Electronics in the top spot in the Japanese market and awarded top marks in the three major categories of product quality, product catalogue and website usability.

Nanocomposite technology has led to the development of capacitors capable of storing twice the energy of existing devices, according to a report in the April 2007 edition of Advanced Materials.

Braemac’s new cable assembly facility in Sydney can handle all types of cable manufacturing.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s next-generation successor to the Hubble, has passed a crucial milestone towards its 2013 launch with the help of National Instruments’ LabVIEW FPGA.

Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, the Queensland Brain Institute's head of visual neuroscience, has received the 2008 Rank Prize for Optoelectronics.

IBM has announced the latest project in its multi-year effort to consolidate its once-sprawling IT infrastructure into a more manageable, cost-effective and environmentally friendly IT service capability.