A team of Australian computer scientists has unveiled the slimmest silicone wiring ever made.

A team of Australian computer scientists has achieved the equivalent of shrinking Alice into Wonderland.

And there’s no telling how deep the rabbit hole will go.

At just four atoms wide and one atom tall, the silicon wiring unveiled by experts at the University of NSW (UNSW) on Friday is the slimmest ever made and is tipped to take the computer industry places it’s never been before.

It is 10,000 times thinner than human hair but retains all the electrical conducting properties of traditional copper wiring.

‘The question that we really wanted to answer was how thin can you make a wire in silicon and it still conduct,’ research leader Professor Michelle Simmons told AAP.

The immediate benefits are expected to be reaped by makers of semiconductors, which are used in all sorts of electrical goods, and allow ever-smaller devices to be manufactured.

But the longer-term aim is to use the wiring in ultra-fast and powerful quantum computers.

‘The whole concept of a quantum computer is it can do calculations in parallel … that gives you an exponential speed-up in the computational time,’ Professor Simmons said.

Although one-off quantum computers have been made, most experts believe we are still decades away from them coming into routine use. Read the rest of this entry →

A Canadian man who realised he had forgotten his passport as he approached the US border found a new way to gain entry – his iPad.

Martin Reisch said on Tuesday a slightly annoyed US border officer let him cross into the United States from Quebec after he presented a scanned copy of his passport on his Apple iPad.

Reisch was a half hour from the border when he decided to try to gain entry rather than turn back and make a two-hour trek back home to Montreal to fetch his passport.

He told the officer he was heading to the US to drop off Christmas gifts for his friend’s kids. He said that true story, the scanned passport and his driver’s licence helped him get through last week.

He said the officer seemed mildly annoyed when he handed him the iPad.

‘I thought I’d at least give it a try,’ Reisch said. ‘He took the iPad into the little border hut. He was in there a good five, six minutes. It seemed like an eternity. When he came back he took a good long pause before wishing me a Merry Christmas.’

Reisch said the officer made an exception. Read the rest of this entry →

Apple said on Monday it had sold more than four million new iPhone 4s models
in their first three days on the market.

Sales took off as the greatly upgraded version of the iPhone 4 was released
to the market on Friday in seven countries: the United States, Australia,
Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain. Read the rest of this entry →

Samsung has sought an injunction to stop Apple from selling its
newly-released iPhone 4S in Australia. Read the rest of this entry →