Articles

Our research, explained

Each paper and patent gets an extended article written for a curious reader without a specialist background: what was asked, what was done, what was found, what it does not show, and where to read the original.

Panels showing how jULIE fibres are drawn from molten glass and metal, a fibre beside a human hair, sharpened tips and assembled multi-fibre probes.

Paper · Journal of Neural Engineering · 2022

Listening to neurons without crowding them out

How glass-coated metal fibres finer than a human hair can record from, and stimulate, single brain cells while leaving the tissue around them largely undisturbed.

14 October 2026 · 12 min read →

Diagram of a microwire bundle running from a flat CMOS chip down into a mouse brain, with the scaling challenges listed on the left and the matching solutions on the right.

Paper · Frontiers in Neuroscience · 2020

Wiring the brain straight into a silicon chip

How bundles of glass-coated microwires, pressed straight onto mass-produced amplifier chips, could let brain recording grow at the pace of the chip industry.

14 October 2026 · 10 min read →

Illustration of a CMOS chip on top of a microwire bundle held in a threaded collet, with free microwires extending below, alongside electron micrographs of a large bundle and a photograph of a bundle beside a coin.

Paper · Science Advances · 2020

Thousands of wires, one chip

Bundles of up to 8,640 fine wires were pressed onto camera, display and recording chips, then used to record neurons in retina and in awake, running mice.

14 October 2026 · 10 min read →

Patent drawing of an implant inside the eye shown from front and back, and a magnified view of a microwire array entering the optic nerve alongside parallel ganglion cell axons.

Patent · US 11,318,299 B2 · granted 2022

A blueprint for a high-channel visual implant

Thousands of glass-coated microwires, driven by the kind of chip that runs a display, designed to stimulate the nerve fibres that carry vision from the eye to the brain.

14 October 2026 · 9 min read →

Patent drawing of a bundle of glass-insulated wires with gold contact hemispheres at the back end and nanostructured recording sites at the front end, above micrographs of polished wires before and after gold deposition.

Patent · US 10,768,139 B2 · granted 2020

Small wire, big surface: the electrochemical probe patent

How rebuilding the tip of a hair-fine wire with nanostructured gold and a sensing layer lets it hear neurons clearly and be tuned to detect chemistry.

14 October 2026 · 8 min read →

Schematic of a divided membrane cell: a lead–silver anode on the left in battery leach liquor where manganese oxide forms, an aluminium cathode on the right in zinc solution where zinc metal plates, and an anion-exchange membrane between them that sulfate ions cross.

Paper · Hydrometallurgy · 2013

Getting zinc and manganese back from dead batteries

One cell, one current, two products: recovering manganese oxide and zinc metal at the same time from spent zinc–carbon batteries.

14 October 2026 · 7 min read →