Returning to the subject of Liz Boatman’s recent post about the importance of ethics training in engineering, consider the following scenario. A major construction project worth hundreds of millions of dollars is in the planning stages. The project, if it is carried out, will be paid for with federal funds. In deciding whether or not to proceed with a particular option, do you (a) rely on a report produced by a firm that stands to earn tens of millions of dollars if a certain option is selected or (b) carry out an independent inquiry to determine the best course of action? The correct answer should be obvious, but USAID, facing a similar decision during rebuilding efforts in war-torn Afghanistan, inexplicably went with option (a). It’s not surprising what happened next.

In this month’s issue of IEEE Spectrum, executive editor Glenn Zorpette reports on the failure of the U.S. to modernize Afghanistan’s electrical infrastructure despite spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on the effort over the last eight years. The centerpiece of his article is the Tarakhil power plant outside of Kabul. Tarakhil is a large diesel-fueled generator that was constructed between 2006 and 2010 under the direction of USAID. Massively over budget and years behind schedule when completed, it currently generates virtually no electricity. Why not? It turns out, diesel power plants are extremely expensive to operate, especially when the fuel must be transported through the mountains of Afghanistan. If Tarakhil were to operate at full capacity, its annual costs would be about one third of Afghanistan’s total tax revenue. Although cheaper options like hydroelectric generation would have made infinitely more sense economically, USAID opted for diesel largely because it was backed by a study carried out by engineering firm Black & Veatch. The problem: Black & Veatch, as the primary contractor for the project, was to earn a fixed percentage of the total project cost as profit, as dictated by the terms of their “cost-plus” contract with USAID. In other words, the more expensive the better, at least for Black & Veatch’s bottom line. Had USAID conducted their own study, they almost certainly would have gone with a cheaper electricity source.

As nanoscientists, we often become so engrossed in the task of shrinking our devices that we neglect to pursue ideas that involve relatively large components. At our worst, our attitude can be summed up as, “If it’s visible to the naked eye, then it is too simple to bother with.”

So a recent paper that demonstrates, for the first time, “electronic tattoos” for biomedical sensing applications comes as a surprise and something of a wake-up call to the nanoscience community. The paper, published last week in the journal Science and written by a team led by John Rogers of the University of Illinois, is notable for its lack of nanotubes, quantum dots, scanning electron micrographs, or any of the other hallmarks of a modern scientific paper about electronic devices. Instead, the majority of the figures in the paper are photographs taken through the same optical microscopes that you’d find in a typical middle school classroom. Heck, a skilled surgeon could probably have pieced together the device by hand. And yet, despite its low degree of difficulty from a technological standpoint, their work has taken the blogosphere by storm and is one of the most exciting results I personally have seen all year.

The transistor, rich in both cutting-edge physics and practical applications, is one of my favorite topics to write about (see BSR issue 17 for my feature article on transistors).  So when Intel Corporation, whose best-selling computer chips each contain billions of transistors, announced this month that it had radically reengineered the transistor for its next generation of microprocessors, I immediately knew my next blog topic was in the bag.

My choice of topic was especially easy because Intel’s new transistor design was invented right here at Berkeley, by a group of electrical engineering professors and graduate students in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Back then, microchip manufacturers were worried that their traditional method for improving transistors – by shrinking them – could only continue until the end of the decade, or perhaps slightly longer.  Transistor dimensions would reach a point that they simply could not be made any smaller without degrading their functionality.