Something was missing. Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements – resistors, capacitors and inductors. But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit – voltage, current, charge and flux – behave in the three basic elements. The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge. But, no one could make such devices and the idea was mostly forgotten. . . until some fellows worked out why their work to develop titanium dioxide memory circuits was glitchy. . . . these efforts have been dogged by bizarre electronic effects, says Williams, who has...

Remaining coherent for seconds. "How do you control something that can't interact with anything"" You do it gingerly and indirectly, the Harvard physicists report in Science. They found that nuclear spins associated with single atoms of carbon-13 -- which make up some 1.1 percent of natural diamond -- can be manipulated via a nearby single electron whose own spin can be controlled with optical and microwave radiation. The excitation of an electron by focusing laser light on a nitrogen vacancy center, a stable defect in a diamond lattice where nitrogen replaces an atom of carbon and develops an electronic spin in its ground state, causes the single electron's spin to act as a very sensitive magnetic probe with extraordinary spatial resolution. Using the nitrogen center as an intermediary, a single carbon-13 atom's nuclear spin is cooled to near absolute zero, creating in the process a single, isolated quantum bit with a coherence time that approaches seconds. The controlled interaction...

Out of the lab, into the fab. IBM today announced the first-ever application of a breakthrough self-assembling nanotechnology to conventional chip manufacturing, borrowing a process from nature to build the next generation computer chips. The natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and enamel on teeth has been harnessed by IBM to form trillions of holes to create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip. In chips running in IBM labs using the technique, the researchers have proven that the electrical signals on the chips can flow 35 percent faster, or the chips can consume 15 percent less energy compared to the most advanced chips using conventional techniques. . . providing the equivalent of two generations of Moore's Law wiring performance improvements in a single step, using conventional manufacturing techniques. . . The secret of IBM's breakthrough lies in how the IBM scientists moved the self-assembly process from the...

Brad DeLong has an interesting post speculating about the likely economic and social impacts of nanotechnology. He frames his argument relative to past technological revolutions such as the industrial revolution in U.K. and the current information revolution and then speculates: Now, assuming it is a useful framework, how would it guide our thinking about nanotechnology? What's going to become absurdly cheap? What human activities are going to turn out to be bottlenecks, and become well-rewarded indeed? What risks are we failing to guard against? What risks that aren't really there will wind up warping our society? And how big will it be? The computer-and-communications technology revolution we have been living through transforms twice as large a share of the economy as did the British Industrial Revolution, looks to last three times as long, and proceeds at a pace three times faster than the revolution in spinning and weaving: it is, relative to the size of the economy, eighteen times...