Upstaging CES

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Isn’t really that hard to do anymore, mostly because of the need to get product announcements out quickly.  Anyway, if you’re heading to CES this week, one of the most common products you’ll see will be ultra books – super thin computers and yet even smaller digital devices.  As cool as many of these products will be, they’re nothing like whats coming.

Tim Wogan writes in PhysicsWorld that a new technique for embedding atomic-scale wires within crystals of silicon has revealed that Ohm’s law can hold true for wires just four atoms thick and one atom tall. The result comes as a surprise because conventional wisdom suggests that quantum effects should cause large deviations from Ohm’s law for such tiny wires. Paradoxically, the researchers hope the finding will aid the development of quantum computers.