[NetBehaviour] Happy snaps from a virus-infested chip.

[marc]

Happy snaps from a virus-infested chip.

New Scientist.
Michael Reilly.

Giving your digital camera a virus may not sound very smart, but a 
memory chip that incorporates millions of viruses may just be the 
fastest thing around.

By coating 30-nanometre-long chunks of tobacco mosaic virus with 
platinum nanoparticles, it’s possible to create a transistor with very 
fast switching speed. Millions of these transistors could eventually be 
used in a memory chip to replace flash memory in mp3 players and digital 
cameras, for example.

A camera fitted with a virus chip would take a few microseconds to 
display an image, compared with the milliseconds taken by existing 
devices, says Yang Yang of the University of California, Los Angeles, 
whose team is working on the virus chip.

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