An electronic vote-counting machine in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels, declared that 4096 more people had cast their vote than the ballot slips testified. The machine had been thoroughly tested and deemed perfect. So what went wrong? Scientists pointed the finger of blame at cosmic rays which can wreak havoc with highly sensitive microelectronic circuits.

Samsung Electronics announced today that it has created the first LCD panel that can produce independent images on each side (front and back) of a mobile LCD display. This will replace traditionally used dual display panels with one, thereby reducing overall thickness of mobile products by at least 1mm. It is expected to commence mass production in the first half of 2007. The LCD product uses of double-gate, thin-film transistor (TFT) architecture. TFT gates are electronic components that convert the necessary voltage at the pixel level, which controls the liquid crystal alignment needed to reproduce on-screen images. Samsung's new double-sided LCD has two gates that operate each pixel instead of one, so the screen on the front can display different images than the one on the back. The double-sided display makes use of Samsung's proprietary Amorphous Silicon Gate (ASG) technology, which accommodates the increased number of TFT gates without increasing the size of the driver integrated circuits. Driver-ICs typically increase in size when more TFT gates are used. The new Samsung mobile display requires only one backlight. One side of the panel operates in a transmissive mode, while the other operates in a reflective mode. By using a unique reflective design that utilizes the light trapped in the opposing screen's transmissive mode, the reflective mode does not solely rely on external light sources such as the sun.