Happy snaps from a virus-infested chip

Oct 05, 2006

Most of the time if you see virus and computer or electronics in the same sentence it is bad news. However some researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have created a transistor with very fast switching speeds. They have done this by coating 30-nanometer-long chunks of tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nanoparticles. They say it could eventually be used to make memory chips for MP3 players and digital cameras. A device fitted with such a virus-chip would access data much more quickly than one using flash memory.