* Astronomy

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.

Read more