By the time Gold arrived at Treblinka, the camp commander had already organised a small band of amateur Jewish musicians to play for the pleasure of the SS and the torment of the victims. When he heard that Gold had arrived, however, he pressed him into service as a conductor of a ‘proper’ camp orchestra.  The hundreds of thousands of Jews who passed through the camp had left many valuable goods in the camp warehouses, and finding instruments was not difficult.
http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/ghett...rsaw/goldartur/

Researchers with the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have come up with a technique by which the electrical conductivity of nanorod crystals of the semiconductor material cadmium-selenide was increased 100,000 times.

The development is said to hold much promise for the future of solar cells made from nanocrystals and the use of solar energy to produce clean and renewable liquid transportation fuels.

“The key to our success is the fabrication of gold electrical contacts on the ends of cadmium-selenide rods via direct solution phase-growth of the gold tips,” says Paul Alivisatos, interim director of Berkeley Lab, who led this research.

Co-author Matthew Sheldon said that while chemical treatments such as etching off surfactant have been shown to enhance the conductivity of thin-film nanocrystal solids, these treatments will often alter the semiconductor’s electrical properties.

In their new study, Sheldon, Alivisatos and their co-authors used single nanostructure electrical measurements to make systematic comparisons between cadmium-selenide nanorods with and without gold tips.

The solution-grown tipping process started with the addition of gold salt to a solution of toluene and cadmium-selenide nanorods, which resulted in gold metal being selectively deposited on the nanorod tips. A silicon wafer test chip was then dipped in this nanorod solution. After submersion, the evaporation of the toulene solvent oriented individual cadmium-selenide nanorods across pre-defined gold electrodes, which were fabricated through electron beam lithography.

The results were gold-tipped cadmium-selenide heterostructure devices whose electrical conductance was characterized in a two-terminal geometry as a function of source-drain voltage and temperature.

The next step in this work will be to determine if the improvements in electrical behavior can translate to improvements in nanocrystal-based energy production. Initially, the group plans to investigate the use of solution grown contacts in photovoltaic applications.
http://www.ecoseed.org/technology/13182-go...ls-berkeley-lab

Conductivity is the measure of the ease at which an electric charge or heat can pass through a material. A conductor is a material which gives very little resistance to the flow of an electric current or thermal energy. Materials are classified as metals, semiconductors, and insulators. Metals are the most conductive and insulators (ceramics, wood, plastics) the least conductive.

Electrical conductivity tells us how well a material will allow electricity to travel through it. Many people think of copper wires as something that has great electrical conductivity.

Thermal conductivity tells us the ease upon which thermal energy (heat for most purposes) can move through a material. Some materials like metals allow heat to travel through them quite quickly. Imagine that with one hand you are touching a piece of metal and with the other, a piece of wood. Which material would feel colder? If you said, "metal," you would be correct. But, in fact, both materials are in fact the same temperature. This is relative thermal conductivity. Metal has a higher heat transferability, or thermal conductivity, than wood, letting the heat from your hand leave faster. If you want to keep something cold the best idea is to wrap it in something that does not have a high heat transferability, or high thermal conductivity, this would be an insulator. Ceramics, and polymers are usually good insulators, but you have to remember that polymers usually have a very low melting temperature. That means if you are designing something that will get very hot the polymer might melt, depending on its melting temperature.

Electrical and thermal conductivity are closely related. For the most part good electrical conductors are also good thermal conductors.
Many products will contain both conductors and insulators- the conductors take the electricity or thermal energy where it is wanted and the insulators prevent it from getting where it isn't wanted.

Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of all metals. In fact, silver defines conductivity - all other metals are compared against it. On a scale of 0 to 100, silver ranks 100, with copper at 97 and gold at 76. Because of this property, and because it doesn't spark easily, silver is commonly used in electrical circuits and contacts. Silver is also utilized in batteries where dependability is mandatory and weight restrictions apply, such as those for portable surgical tools, hearing aids, pacemakers and space travel.
http://www.lehigh.edu/~amb4/wbi/kwardlow/conductivity.htm