Sometimes akin to receiving a root canal, holiday gift giving is not for the faint of heart. Most times, the recipient is left disappointed. Other times, the present will serve as a bone of contention. It makes matters 10 times worse if the receiver has an engineering background. You already know why.

Miniaturization ranks as the driving force behind the semiconductor industry. The tremendous gains in computer performance since the 1950s are largely due to the fact that ever smaller structures can be manufactured on silicon chips. Chemical engineers at ETH Zurich have now succeeded in reducing the size of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) — which are currently primarily used in premium mobile phones and TV screens — by several orders of magnitude. Their study was recently published in the journal Nature Photonics.

The phrase ‘liquid metal’ may bring to mind something hazardous, like mercury or molten steel. But in the Laboratory of Photonic Materials and Fiber Devices (FIMAP) in EPFL’s School of Engineering, it simply means a mixture of indium and gallium that is nontoxic, remains liquid at room temperature, and shows great promise for developing electronic fibers for wearables and robotic sensors.

As more devices get piled onto computer chips to increase processing power capacity, heat generation becomes increasingly concentrated. This heat must be removed to keep chip performance high and is currently achieved by circulating water through millimeter-scale channels to cool nanosized hotspots. This scale mismatch reduces the cooling efficiency, by consuming more water than necessary, also raising environmental concerns.

Scientists have long sought to make semiconductors that are also superconducting, thereby enhancing their speed and energy efficiency and enabling new quantum technologies. However, achieving superconductivity in semiconductor materials such as silicon and germanium has proved challenging due to the difficulty of maintaining an optimal atomic structure with the desired conduction behavior.