FOR half a century, the essence of progress in the computer industry has been to do more with less. Moore’s law famously observes that the number of transistors which can be crammed into a given space doubles every 18 months. The amount of data that can be stored has grown at a similar rate. Yet as components get smaller, making them gets harder and more expensive. On May 10th Paul Otellini, the boss of Intel, a big American chipmaker, put the price of a new chip factory (known as a fab) at around $10 billion.
Happily for those that lack Intel’s resources, there may be a cheaper option—namely to mimic Mother Nature, who has been building tiny devices, in the form of living cells and their components, for billions of years, and has thus got rather good at it. A paper published in Small, a nanotechnology journal, sets out the latest example of the technique. In it, a group of researchers led by Sarah Staniland at the University of Leeds, in Britain, describe using naturally occurring proteins to make arrays of tiny magnets, similar to those employed to store information in disk drives.
The researchers took their inspiration from Magnetospirillum magneticum, a bacterium that is sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field thanks to the presence within its cells of flecks of magnetite, a form of iron oxide. Previous work has isolated the protein that makes these miniature compasses. Using genetic engineering, the team managed to persuade a different bacterium—Escherichia coli, a ubiquitous critter that is a workhorse of biotechnology—to manufacture this protein in bulk.
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