Gallery: Carbon, Bacteria, and Fish Balls: The Machines of the Future
01graphene
Today, microprocessors are built with silicon. But tomorrow, they'll be built with something else. This past week, with a [paper](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n7/full/ncomms1955.html) published in the academic journal *Nature Communications*, researchers at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and the Swedish research institute Acreo AB revealed a new means of building chips using graphene -- a substance long hailed as the future of micro-electronics -- and their work takes the material that much closer to fulfilling its potential. Graphene is essentially sheets of carbon measuring a single atom thick, and it can carry electric charges much faster than materials used in today's chips. Its discovery [won](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/graphene-gallery/) the Nobel Prize for two University of Manchester scientists, but we're still a long way from seeing it in commercial processors. Though graphene is wonderfully adept at conducting electricity, it doesn't work quite as well as a *semiconductor* -- which is essential to building transistors -- and it doesn't easily connect to other parts of a chip. But we're closer than we were before. As reported by the [*BBC*](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18868848), the German and Swedish researchers have honed a new breed of graphene that's made using a substance called silicon carbide. Silicon carbide is basically a crystal made from silicon and carbon, and if you heat it up, the silicon atoms will rise up from the crystal, leaving a layer of graphene below. What these researchers have done is develop a new way of etching electrical channels into the silicon carbide. Adding hydrogen to the etching process, they can change the way the silicon carbide crystal ties into the layer of graphene. They can make some parts of the material act as a conductor while others act as a semiconductor. This lets them build transistors, but it also means these transistors will more easily connect to other parts of a chip. But graphene is just one substance that could remake the future of computing. One day, we may see computer hardware made with everything from sapphires and diamonds to bacteria and, well, salmon testes (see images above). Of course, we may just stick with what we've always used. As those researchers in Germany and Sweden push for graphene chips, others are working with a substance called silicene, which is essentially a single layer of...[silicon atoms](http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i15/e155501). *Image: U.S. Army Materiel Command/Flickr*
02saphire
Patrick Charton and the French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA have designed a disk that's made of sapphire. It stores data using engravings of platinum, according to [*Science*](http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/07/a-million-year-hard-disk.html). Charton says the disk will survive for a million years -- which is quite a bit longer than the life span of today's hard disks. The idea is that the disk will always be there to let our ancestors known where we've buried the nuclear waste. Of course, there's another problem. "We have no idea what language to write it in," Charton says. *Image: dctim1/Flickr*
03diamond
Scientists at the University of Southern California have built a quantum computer inside a [diamond](http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/27023/quantum-computer-built-inside-a-diamond). According to the researchers, a diamond isn't just a girl's best friend. It can help prevent decoherence -- where a quantum system collapses into a classical system, breaking your quantum computer. Their diamond machine turns a rogue nitrogen nuclei and an accompanying electron into a pair of quantum bits, or qubits, which can hold exponentially more information than classical bits. The team attempts to solve the decoherence problem by constantly changing the spin of the electron using microwave pulses. "It’s a little like time travel," one of the researchers told the USC news service, explaining that if you switch the direction of the spin, you can shift an electron back to a past state. *Image: Vermin Inc/Flickr*
04bacteria
Researchers at the [University of Leeds](http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3181/bacterial_builders_on_site_for_computer_construction) hope to build a hard drive out of bacteria. Basically, they're feeding iron to these microscopic organisms and turning them into tiny magnets, and -- at least in theory -- these magnetized bacteria can then be used to store 1s and 0s. Plus, they can serve as tiny wires that connect other micro-electronic devices. "It is possible to tune these biological wires to have a particular electrical resistance. In the future, they could be grown connected to other components as part of an entirely biological computer," Dr. Masayoshi Tanaka told the Leeds news service. *Image: Sanofi Pasteur/Flickr*
05memristor
HP says it has developed a [brand new electrical building block](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/hp-memristors/) called the "memristor" -- a resistor that can store information even after losing power -- and this new-age contraption is built using two layers of the semiconductor titanium dioxide. Basically, one layer of titanium dioxide includes "oxygen vacancies" and the other doesn't. The top layer with the vacancies is conductive, and the bottom layer without the vacancies isn't. If you send a voltage through the device, you can move the vacancies from one layer to the other, and that let's you build a switch. It's "on" when the vacancies are in one layer, "off" when they're in another. The trick is that the switch can hold it's information even when it loses power. Memristor is short for memory resistor, and if HP can bring the thing to market, it could significantly improve the efficiency of today's memory technologies. *Image: Wikicommons*
06chum-salmon-the-third-crow
Researchers from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have built a write-once-read-many (WORM) data storage device using DNA. And not just any DNA. DNA from [the testes of a salmon](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/salmon-storag/). DNA plays nicely with metal nanoparticles, and when you mix it with these ultra-small pieces of metal, you can change its optical and electrical properties. When you do that, you can store information, switching between an electrically conductive state (a "1") and electrically resistive state (a "0"). Why salmon testes? The researchers say that salmon testes produce lots of sperm. And that sperm includes lots of DNA. Plus, all that sperm is bio-friendly. What more do you want? *Image: Austin Baker/Flickr*
