Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory,...( NAVIGATION -- Micro gyro . . . .....)

Airplanes, submarines and even automobiles of tomorrow may be equipped with arrays of inexpensive high-performance micro-mechanical gyroscopes for navigation and other purposes. The proprietary system of MEMS gyroscope arrays being developed by a team consisting of Panos Datskos, Slo Rajic and Nickolay Lavrik of Oak Ridge National Laboratory is radically different than today's gyroscopes, which are big and costly. Instead, this system consists of multiple highly sensitive and accurate silicon chip-scale gyroscopes. The researchers envision their system being especially useful for navigation and geolocation in environments where global positioning systems are not possible or practical. These tiny gyroscopes could also find their way into automobiles for ride stabilization and rollover detection. In addition, the researchers believe their system will be useful for several consumer electronics applications. The research is funded by the U.S. Navy and ORNL's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. [Contact: Ron Walli, (865) 576-0226; wallira@ornl.gov]

ELECTRONICS -- Zinc oxide LEDs . . .

Efficient yet inexpensive light-emitting diodes made of zinc oxide could one day replace today's state-of-the-art gallium nitride-based devices. Key to the discovery is production of positively charged carriers -- p-type doping -- in zinc oxide using rapid pulse thermal processing. "LEDs require both p-type positively charged carriers -- and n-type -- negatively charged carriers -- materials in close contact," said Jun Xu, lead author of the paper published recently in Applied Physics Letters (Vol. 92, Issue 16). "Zinc oxide is potentially a good light emitter because of its high exciton binding energy and vertically aligned nanostructure." The new technique overcomes problems encountered with other techniques and provides the ability to genera
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