Slashdot is reporting that scientists have devised a way to make memory chips out of the tobacco mosaic virus. This was accomplished by coating 30-nonometer-long chunks of the virus with platinum nanoparticles resulting in a transistor with very fast switching speeds.

Millions of these transistors could be used to create a memory chip to replace flash memory in electronics like MP3 players and USB drives. With the hybrid hard drives on the near horizon for Windows Vista, this breakthrough could mean super fast booting of our computers in the future as well. Yang Yang of the University of California says that a camera fitted with a virus chip would take a few microseconds to display an image, rather than the milliseconds current cameras need to display images. For more information on how the transistor works, read the full story at New Scientist. Virus image via www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.