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Politics : RAMTRONIAN's Cache Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gammaray who wrote (5038)	3/28/1998 9:07:00 PM
From: Hiram Walker	Respond to of 14464

Neil, we are all still here,just musing about different things. My new tech is DNA memory from Israel,it seems DNA stands can be linked by a small silver wire,and communicate in RAM fashion. Hey, if they clone me,can they use my brain to make chips(not fish and chips)? Scientists Seek Breakthrough in Electronic Miniaturization AP 27-MAR-98 HAIFA, Israel (AP) One day, Israeli physicist Uri Sivan hopes to meet a colleague's 40-year-old challenge to store all the texts of the Library of Congress 17 million books along 500 miles of shelves on a space the size of a speck of dust. Sivan says while that day is still far off, he and two fellow researchers have made progress by mixing biology and electronics for the first time letting DNA molecules build electronic circuits. "We are using the same machinery used in biology. We are taking advantage of 4.5 billion years of evolution and letting the DNA do most of the work," Sivan said as he fiddled with the espresso machine in his office at the Technion, one of Israel's premier research institutes located in the hills above Haifa Bay. In a first step, the research team Sivan, chemist Yoav Eichen and biophysicist Erez Braun has produced a conductive wire that is one-thousandth the width of a hair, or less than half the size of wires in use today. The Technion team hopes to build a wire that is 250 times smaller than the existing ones. The implications are as far reaching as the proportions are microscopic. A microchip assembled with DNA could create faster, cheaper and more complex computers and electronic products. A computer built with DNA-made microchips could store 100,000 times as much information as a current model. The process of building a microchip with DNA begins the same way an ordinary chip is built. However, single strands of DNA molecules are attached to the gold electrodes that are traditionally used as connectors. In the lab, Braun played a video of the experiment taken through a microscope. The footage showed the molecules of the DNA strand quickly recognizing each other and attaching to the two electrodes to create a bridge. To make the bridge conduct electricity, a thin layer of silver was added onto the structure, resulting in a tiny metal wire. The Technion team's work was published in the Feb. 19 issue of the science journal Nature and their conceptual breakthrough in the field of nanoelectronics has won praise from U.S. colleagues. "This will likely be viewed as the paper that set us off down the road," said Daniel Colbert of Rice University's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology in Texas. The idea to harness the self-assembling abilities of tiny DNA molecules to create electronic circuits was the result of ongoing conversations between the three Technion colleagues. "We came up with the idea over lots of coffee, liters (gallons) of coffee," said Sivan. "Mega liters of coffee," joked Braun. The team said the research is still in its infancy, and they have far to go before meeting a 1958 challenge by a colleague, Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, to store the Library of Congress on a speck of dust. "We have shown that DNA molecules can be effectively used as organizers for the simplest electronic component, a conducting wire," said Eichen. "The next step is a self-assembled transistor 100 times smaller than those used in present microchips," he added. Hey,if Hitachi got this,they wouldn't have to worry about assembly,it would do it for them. Wow, with their speed,they could get a chip in production by the next Mellenium. Hey, I picture a bunch of Japanese scientists,sitting in a room, arguing over who gets the coffee and donuts. I bet by the time they get them the donuts are so stale you can use them for hockey pucks,go Hitachi! Hiram