Electronic wastes - discarded computers, televisions, mobile phones, audio equipment and batteries - can leach lead and other substances that may seep into groundwater supplies.

The progression toward smaller and smaller electrical and mechanical components presents challenges in creating devices on scales measured in microns and nanometers. One solution may be to develop materials that automatically arrange themselves in useful patterns.

Jillian M Buriak of West Lafayette, Ind., will receive the 2003 Award for Pure Chemistry from the American Chemical Society on 25 March for developing ways to attach molecular signals directly to silicon chips, with an eye toward ever smaller electronic devices and perhaps even biological implants.

Optical fibres regularly carry billions of phone conversations and other data transmissions every day and are a fundamental part of optical sensing and numerous medical applications. The photonic devices responsible for this traffic are being made even more efficient and versatile by handing over some of the switching and reconfiguring chores to the fibres themselves - the trunk lines linking all the optical nodes.

A molecular switch took only 47 zepto-joules to operate in a recent experiment, 10,000 times less than transistor switches used in current high-speed computers. The molecular switch consists of rotating one of the four phenyl legs attached to a complicated porphyrin molecule from one stable position to another.

Texas Instruments has announced that its complete logic portfolio is now offered in Pb-free solutions for all finishes and balls.

NewTek Support Pty Ltd has an approved calibration centre which services and calibrates the range of National Instrument hardware products in Australia.

Agilent technologies has announced design verification application support to help electronic and wireless communication companies get products to market faster. The electronic design automation (EDA) software is integrated with test instrumentation to offer 'connected solutions' applications.

APC in Australia and New Zealand has announced a voluntary recall of two specific models in its Back-UPS CS uninterruptible power supply (UPS) line due to potential safety issues that may result in over heating and represent a potential fire hazard.

Technical Insights Frost & Sullivan has discovered two developments in the light-emitting diode (LED) arena. A single LED, with the facility to switch its emission spectrum and a hybrid device based on an inorganic quantum dot/organic LED combination capable of enhanced luminescence.

Texas Instruments' fully functional wireless digital base band on 90 nm process offers many benefits. By shrinking the dimension of the transistors power consumption, size and manufacturing costs are reduced relative to the previous manufacturing process. Distances between transistors are also reduced, increasing overall processor performance and allowing integration of many more features on an equivalent size chip.

Major advances are still being made on magnetic disk drives despite competition from optical storage media like CD-ROM, DVD, semiconductor flash and smart cards.

Photofabrication Engineering Inc (PEI) has a line of custom-made photochemically-etched anodes and cathodes for fuel cells, heat exchangers, oxygen and hydrogen generators. These products have applications in the aerospace, automotive , biotechnology, medical, appliances, power and electrical/electronic industries.

In the future, powering up your laptop may require you unroll it first. Engineers at the University of Toronto have constructed flexible technology that could lay the groundwork for future generations of bendable television, computer and mobile phone screens.

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK has joined forces with Atmel to create 'strained silicon' microchips, which involves adding a material called germanium to the traditional silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing.