Eco-Friendly Flat Screens for All

Researchers from the Tel Aviv University have found a way of having a 'greener' flat screen TV production, and even medical equipment.

Near every house in the modern society has a television set, an during the last few years, everybody wanted The flat screen TV, cheaper and bigger every year, to the detriment of the environment.

The problem, in the consuming society, is that nearly 70 percent of heavy metals in landfill come from discarded electronics, in the United States alone.

Because electronic devices pollute, before, during and after they're used, Tel Aviv University develops an organic LED light source for home electronics, medicine and clean energy in general.

Scientists Nadav Amdursky and Prof. Gil Rosenman of Tel Aviv University's Department of Electrical Engineering, have found a way of 'greening' the optics and electronics industry by using a discovery in nanotechnology, based on self-assembled peptides nanotubes.

The two of them say that this technology could serve as an ecological way of producing flat screen TVs, but also to make medical equipment more sensitive, like subcutaneous ultrasound devices.

The researchers were inspired by a biomaterial discovered by Prof. Ehud Gazit of the university's Department of Microbiology and Biotechnology, for the Alzheimer's disease research, and they developed a new nanomaterial based on both physics and biology.

The newly created biological material is the base for their eco-friendly light-emitting diodes – LED, that they say is much more than a cleaner way of creating light.

The LED generates a strong signal than can be very useful in motors, actuators and ultrasound, and unlike the traditional light sources, it has a nano-scale architecture, that makes it easy to integrate in a LED TV, with an improved picture, of course.

The Tel Aviv University team has written a patent to cover their 'organic LED' lights, because as Amdursky, a doctoral student working under Prof. Rosenman's supervision, says, “We are growing our own light sources.”

These new organic nano-light sticks are made from carbon, which makes them cheap as well as ecological, and according to Amdursky, the light emitted by the new light sticks is not very different than that of today's normal LED lights.

Amdursky adds that there is no “need for a special plant, bacterium or a big machine to grow these structures in,” stressing that the applications of the technology are largest than the widest screen television.