The ever-versatile nanotubes can even behave as transistors themselves. Cees Dekker, of Delft University in the Netherlands, has made nanotubes act as both transistors and wires for a miniature electronic circuit. This fall, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported making a transistor from a single buckyball connected to gold electrodes. When the scientists zapped the buckyball with an electrical current, it began to vibrate. That's one of the problems with molecular electronics, says study co-author Paul Alivisatos.
Single molecules are subject to the whims of flowing electrons.
Scientists are thrilled about making these tiny components. But making them work as well as a Pentium is a different matter. Dr. Tour's molecules are messy creatures, dangling chains of extra atoms every which way. But scientists may have found a way around such messiness. In 1997, computer scientists at Hewlett-Packard built an experimental computer, called the Teramac, with all the cheap, defective pieces left over from real computers.