Water plus graphene will soon equal computers [Madscience]

Graphene was hailed as a miracle substance. Easy to make and cheap to acquire, it could help with anything from DNA sequencing to power production. Now, thanks to water and physics, it could soon be turned into a computer.

Graphene has a lot of incredibly useful properties. It's just carbon, meaning you can get it anywhere, and although it's arranged in sheets an atom thick, it is relatively easy to make. It was applicable to a huge number of technologies, but it resisted the most common component of the most common technology — it couldn't become a transistor in a computer.

Transistors, at their most basic, are on-off switches. Anything that has two different positions can be used to make a computer. Only certain things, however, could make a useful computer. Semiconductors were among those things. They had an 'off' position, which with the use of electrical field could be turned into an 'on' position. Electricity being fast and malleable, the combination made for good computers.

Graphene is just a good conductor of electricity. It doesn't have a readily available on-off switch, both because of its substance and its symmetrical structure. But now, a recent test has shown how you could go about creating one.

Water is one of the most common and responsive substances in the world. Doctor Nikhil Karatkar conducted a test which shows how its properties can be used to help graphene become a part of the tech market. A layer of graphene is placed on a layer of silicon and silicon dioxide. Water is released into the chamber, and shuns the silicon, glomming on to the graphene. This breaks the graphene's symmetry, and makes it into a poor conductor. So the graphene now has an off switch.

Although this has been done before with other substances, doing it with water is a huge breakthrough. Water isn't a dangerous material, or an expensive material. Moreover, water is relatively easy to control. Through temperature or pressure, scientists can control humidity. Make things wet - or cool enough, or pressured enough - and the water will descend on the graphene, turning the transistor off. Dry it out a bit, and the water lifts off the graphene, allowing it to conduct electricity again.

So water and carbon could be the bones of the next generation of computers.

Via Online Library and RPI.

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MacBook Air review (late 2010)

The MacBook Air has never exactly been a simple product to review. Since the laptop's launch back in the heady days of 2008, we've always considered it a niche, high-end product and much less a mainstream system. Originally, the wafer-thin (and somewhat underpowered) laptop sold for a painful starting price of $1,799, and had its fair share of problems. Well, we've come a long way from Apple's original play, with two all-new models of the Air. The first is an update to the standard 13.3-inch model priced at a significantly cheaper $1,299, while the newest entrant to the MacBook family is a tiny 11.6-inch model that's nearly the size of an iPad -- and not wildly more expensive, starting at $999. Of course, over time the market for laptops of this type has gotten quite crowded, with a slew of ULV-based thin-and-lights that offer lots of options for lots of budgets. Do the new MacBook Airs have enough to take on a crowded market, or have they been bumped out of the game altogether? Read on for the full Engadget review to find out!

Gallery: MacBook Air (13-inch) hands-on

Gallery: MacBook Air (11.6-inch)

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MacBook Air review (late 2010) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MacBook Air upgrade kit bumps capacity to 256GB, turns old module into USB 3.0 SSD

Sure, the only remotely user-replaceable component on the 11.6-inch MacBook Air are those tiny Toshiba SSDs, but PhotoFast's got what might be one of the most elegant upgrade solutions we've ever seen. The Air USB 3 Adapter gives you not only a brand-spanking-new 256GB module with a Sandforce SF-1200 controller, but a speedy USB 3.0 flash drive too -- which smartly doubles as the mechanism by which you move your old files over, as you can just transfer everything through the USB port. Once you're done swapping modules, the company says you'll see a 30 percent speed boost over the original drive, with reported transfer rates of 250MB/s on both sequential reads and writes. Shame the Japanese company didn't specify any sort of estimated release date or price.

MacBook Air upgrade kit bumps capacity to 256GB, turns old module into USB 3.0 SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 04:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS Eee Pad EP101TC getting Tegra 2 treatment ahead of March launch?

More from DigiTimes this morning and its chatty sources within NVIDIA and Taiwanese supply chains. First up is talk that ASUS' 10-inch Eee Pad -- presumably, the Android loving EP101TC said to cost less than $399 -- will launch in March of 2011 with NVIDIA's Tegra 2 taking care of the processing duties. DigiTimes' sources also remind us that Tegra 2 tablets are on the way from Dell, Samsung, MSI, and Toshiba in addition to smartphones from ASUS, Motorola, and LG. Good to know, but for as long as Tegra 2 has been discussed, we've yet to see the SoC ship inside anything worth getting too excited over. And don't even mention the Boxee Box, they switched to Intel at the last minute, remember? Maybe Dell's Looking Glass tablet will change all that when it launches any day now.

ASUS Eee Pad EP101TC getting Tegra 2 treatment ahead of March launch? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 201! 0 05:55: 00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Painter Transforms Google Maps Into Works of Art [GoogleMaps]

Megan Scheminske has a great eye—she took the same mundane map imagery you look at every time you check directions with Google and spun it into minimalist, hyperlocal beauty—the "You Are Here" series.

Scheminske's website is essentially an art project in itself, pairing photographs on the terrain that inspired them with a google pin drop of that area. It's all very meta! But the work is novel, and interesting far beyond its gimmick. [Megan Scheminske via reddit]

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