You will need a new-ish (core 2 or better, probably) computer to even run the emulator. Download the SDK and Eclipse and then set yourself up to test on your phone and save yourself a lot of grief. http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html

Nanopore sequencing has been around for at least a decade in the lab. They admit that their method of using tunnel junctions to detect the DNA cannot even distinguish between different base pairs.

For background, here's the basic idea of a classical nanopore sequencer:

1. Make a solution with ions in it with a very thin membrane separating two different compartments each containing an electrode. The membrane has a very tiny hole (nanopore)

2. Apply a voltage. This will either attract or repel the salt ions, thus you get a detectable current passing through the nanopore.

3. Put DNA in the solution. The hole is hopefully small enough that the DNA can only go through as if stranded like thread through a needle. As the different base pairs move through, they block up varying amounts of the hole, manifesting as small changes in resistance across the hole.

4. Profit

The only real limiter is how thin you can make the membrane. Recently, some researchers used graphene, which is thinner than your average base pair, and so you do not get a resistance that is the convolution of many base pairs blocking up the pore at any given time. For more, google "Dekker DNA translocation through graphene nanopores" to see that they can already detect single pairs - and do it thousands of times a second.

I guess since IAAP (Physicist), I can try to translate some of the physics-ese. Here is the basic argument of the letter:

1. One of the reasons Geim got the Nobel was that he "discovered" graphene. However, the paper the committee is using to establish the date he discovered it (2004) in fact has no reference to graphene but rather graphite, it's well-known cousin. This is an important distinction because a few other groups have graphene papers around the same time.

2. Geim uses a method for creating graphene that is not commercially viable, yet has been credited with a revolution in electronics technology.

3. One of Geim's collaborators goes almost completely uncited although his data is used in the document and appears credited to Geim.

Agree with what you said for the most part, but I just wanted to point out that I think Linux is used behind the scenes too. For example, on a long flight back to the U.S. while I was flying with a major European carrier, the entertainment system crashed and I saw the Linux penguin pop up on the screen. I agree though: especially in the states, most of the displays you see on walls in buildings are Windows.

Geim's original paper on the subject ( http://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0410/0410550.pdf ) was a real fascination because it was so simple and yet enabled many people to do real research. The original paper uses scotch tape to peel off monolayers of different bulk materials, but only graphene showed anything interesting (in particular, the so-called "field-effect" which is the principle behind CMOS transistors. To be sure, the quality of graphene produced from this method is complete crap compared to more advanced methods used by groups today (chemical vapor deposition of various organic molecules, carbon gettering from metals, epitaxial growth by silicon sublimation from SiC), but an impressive amount of exotic physical phenomena (e.g., quantum hall effect) was seen in what was essentially crap.

No doubt, Geim has probably indirectly gotten thousands of researchers perhaps a billion dollars in funding in less than a decade, but I don't think Geim's contribution was as much physics as it was successfully marketing his research (outsiders like to think of science as being purely meritocratic, but it scientists are still people, and people are susceptible to hype). In my opinion, there are many better physics researchers in the field than Geim himself, but none of them are nearly as good at communication and generating buzz.

In any case, congratulations to him for winning it so soon.

... considering Apple does not even offer Macbooks with core i3's. You must get core i5 or i7 and pay out the wazoo (to the tune of $1700+) for it or else you're stuck with core 2 duo's, as far as I know. Then again, UVa is not a tech school and so I don't expect many of their incoming class to know or care. Meanwhile, my $500 dollar laptop from a local store 4 years ago still runs AutoCAD 2010 just fine with a $40 RAM upgrade.

I have neither the capacity nor the will to vet the paper, but it should be noted that ArXiv is not peer reviewed. While experimentalists use it as a place to publish pre-prints of their papers and will typically only put them up after the papers have been accepted, but theorists use the medium as a substitute for publishing and so many wacky and untrue claims get put up there.

There's no work to check. His GMT time is correct, and I'm guessing he knows his own country's time zone offsets from GMT.

Presumably "EST" refers to Australian east coast time and not American EDT given it was 2:45pm EDT when the launch occurred.

(I was the GP) More likely than cell phones, definitely. Pollution causes less incident light to be polarized, and therefore makes it harder for bees to use it for travel. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarized_light_pollution

Silly me! These are a few ions, and hence there are no phonons since there is no crystal structure. Still, I would like to know exactly what they mean by "vibrations"

The doppler effect to me is a very specific phenomenon whereby there is a shift in perceived wavelength when there is relative motion between a source emitting waves and the observer. The article talks about lattice vibrations being the source of the shift (these vibrations are referred to as "phonons" by physicists), which has nothing to do with relative motion.

Short answer, yes. NAND is perhaps the simplest logic gate to make with CMOS technology (requires 4 transistors), which is why it is talked about so much because of the space savings involved.