https://twitter.com/DrewHLive/status/1379551495230791685
MCALLEN TX: Upon my arrival to a Catholic Charity assisting migrants, (Catholic Charities RGV) I discovered one of their “staff” stuffing children into the back seat of a car without any seats, seatbelts or car seats. The man refused to identify himself. This has gone too far.
>Charles Lieber and specifically his work on "Virus sized transistors"
https://harvardmagazine.com/2001/11/liquid-computing.html
Liquid Computing
Imagine a computer, suspended in a flask of liquid, which assembles itself when the liquid is poured onto a desktop. Sound like science fiction? Hyman professor of chemistry Charles Lieber is making it happen in his laboratory, where researchers have already created tiny logic circuits and memorythe two main components of a computerin just this manner. And these circuits are tiny, just a few atoms across.
Lieber and his team of chemists have done a kind of end-run around the silicon-based microelectronics industry, which for the last 35 years has been making transistorstiny switches that can be either on or offexponentially smaller every 18 to 24 months. Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore observed this doubling of computing capacity as early as 1965, and his observation became codified as "Moore's Law." However, says Lieber, "continued shrinkage ultimately becomes problematic in terms of just how one achieves [it]." Scientists anticipate that we will reach the limits of our ability to create silicon chips using standard fabrication line methods sometime between 2012 and 2017.
That's because manufacturers today create microelectronic circuits either by depositing silicon on a surface or by etching it away (for example, with acid). But just as metal after it rusts "is sort of rough," says Lieber, current methods for working with silicon leave rough surfaces that, on the nanometer scale (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or one hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair), constitute an ever greater proportion of the tiny wires that make up those circuits. "Ultimately, you can't keep using those methods," he says, "because things will be very non-uniform on a small scale. The smaller circuits become, the more imperfections in the manufacturing process begin to play a role in their performance."
Lieber has "philosophical differences" with the industry's "top-down" approach to nanotechnologytaking big things and making them smaller. "The way to truly revolutionize the future," he says, "is to take a completely different approach: build things from the bottom up." He has done that by starting with the smallest of building blockswires only three nanometers across that can be produced relatively cheaply on a bench top with a few thousand dollars' worth of equipment.
Lieber makes the building blocks using a catalyst that favors growth in only one direction. A key characteristic of the process he developed is that it enables nanowires to be prepared in virtually any "flavor" (i.e., with specific conductive properties). Mixing and matching flavors can then lead to different types of devices. The devices are made in an equally simple manner: an alcohol solution of a specific nanowire flavor is poured through a grooved channel in a polymer block to produce an array of parallel wires. Another set of wires can be laid perpendicular to the first simply by rotating the apparatus 90 degrees. Already, his lab has produced a transistor just 10 atoms across.