Actually, there is a degree in "cool alternative energy technology". My college recently started offering a PhD in "sustainability", whatever that is.

From the second article: "Bott tested Mdinstall.pkg on a Mac running Safari, and the malware installed itself without a password." It seems you don't need a password for at least one of the new variants, although you still get the "This is from the internet, do you trust it?" warning.

Maybe they are talking about a device no thicker than glass because they're building it on a sheet of glass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_transistor

Depends what you mean by "quantum effects". Some effects are already apparent.

So I don't think they've highlighted the move to extended UV (EUV) enough. What new wavelength of light are they using? The semiconductor industry has been stuck at 193nm for a long time now. If the industry moves to a smaller wavelength it's a pretty big deal. New wavelength means new lithography materials. It may not be interesting to those of you asking "what size hard drive does this mean?" but to those who know this stuff it's important.

Exactly. For those of you who want a number, I've heard 10nm is where the wall will be, but I'm not sure the exact reason for that. I believe ThreeGigs is right on the money though. Dopants in silicon are randomly distributed, and when you're only dealing with a few hundred silicon atoms, you're only talking about a handful of dopants. So this random distribution starts to become non-uniformly distributed.

That's why it's so good!

The lack of junctions certainly removes many fabrication steps. And e-beam lithography isn't necessary, it's just the patterning method they use. So it's only a matter of being able to match the feature size with another lithography method. I'm fairly certain 10nm lines made by photolithography have been demonstrated, which is what this structure is suggested for.