Re:It's the polymer (Score 1)

... well I guess that's exactly the point. The news release(who said that news offices are really something good?) focuses completely on the wrong part of the story. Creating structures on micron scales is rather boring - and you wouldn't need those fancy block-co-polymers for that anyway.

What's more interesting is the creation of a ordered structure on a nanometer scale (which is a bit a pain in the neck as those blocks usually align parallel to the surface of the film (due to a preferential interaction of the block components and the surfaces...) - but Tom and his guys managed to get them change their minds ;-) (amazing how motivating E fields can be...) and stand vertically - it's quite amazing to see those well ordered nano-structured surfaces (http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/photos/breaking%2 0news/UMlogodetail1-300.jpg).

As none of the block components is really conductive... you need to take out the ones which formed the cylinders (keep the rest) and fill the holes with a metal... sounds easy, eh? It isn't.... The last time I tried to fill a hole of 20 nm diameter with a metal I just buried the hole under a nice layer of metal :( .... (wrong story I guess). Anyway... what you end up with is an array of wires (I think Mark & Tom already managed a length of a few microns) and a diameter of a few nanomters.... I think that's cool....

... what's nice about it is, that unlike those pretty images some people had been speaking about (HAL, right?) where the atoms had to be moved 1 by 1... this technique allows the generation of thousands of rather well controlled nano wires, just by self assembly of a polymer.... I'd think that's already quite a step to an application.

.... anywayz... written already 2 much again oo