"Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things. The study is published online this week in the interdisciplinary journal Nature Communications.

Tree + memory = circuitry: The race for ever shrinking circuitry has apparently headed for the trees. Researchers have found that a protein isolated from poplar trees can host silicon nanoparticles as small as 5nm across. The protein's stable and acts as an insulator, isolating each nanoparticle and allowing them to be addressed individually by an atomic force microscope tip. The authors demonstrate they can use this combination as a Set-Reset machine, a very simple logic circuit with memory.