X-Message-Number: 12557 Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 17:25:50 -0400 From: Jan Coetzee <> Subject: Gas Powered Computers I guess the uploaders are going to be loaded into gas not silicon? "Gas Powered Computers Closer To Reality - Magazine LONDON (Reuters) - A super-fast, minuscule molecular computer driven by gases may be a step closer to reality thanks to research by a Berlin-based chemist, New Scientist magazine reported Thursday. James La Clair, formerly with the Scripps Research Institute in California, had developed a molecule that could be switched on and off by nitrogen and carbon dioxide, it said. ``This finding provides a new cornerstone for future electronics,'' La Clair told the weekly magazine. ``This technology may some day lead to computers that only need gases and light to think.'' Molecular computing could help to solve a major problem facing the technology industry -- the physical limitations of silicon-based transistors. Scientists at Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, have warned of problems with further scaling down of transistors. Computers based on molecules, not on silicon, could make computers in the future much more powerful and compact. ``Molecular circuits could be just a fraction of a nanometer (one thousand-millionth of a meter) wide. Researchers have already created molecular wires, logic gates (a building block of computers) and switches, which may some day be hooked up to make a working computer a fraction of the size of existing machines,'' the magazine said. La Clair's work is interesting because unlike already developed molecular, switches which are made up of large groups of molecules, he has devised a switch based on a single molecule. ``In the presence of nitrogen, the molecule known as SENSI, flips into the fluorescing or 'on' state. Replacing nitrogen with CO2 switches it to the 'off' state in which it cannot fluoresce,'' the magazine said. The research is still in its early stages and there are still many problems to be worked out, but New Scientist said La Clair was confident he would eventually be able to overcome them and develop digital devices consisting of many molecules that could be turned on and off by tiny amounts of gases." Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12557