The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the US has begun laying off around 10% of its 6500-strong workforce in preparation for "challenges" in the lab's 2014 budget, which will start on 1 October. The lab's redundancy offer gives workers one week of base salary for each year of continuous service, up to a maximum of 26 weeks. As of last Friday, 399 individuals had accepted the lay-off terms.

Significant limitations

The Obama administration's budget request for 2014 includes about $1.48 bn for the LLNL – a sum that lab director Parney Albright told a Senate subcommittee last month "will significantly limit our ability to utilize the National Ignition Facility and undermine [our nuclear] stewardship programme". However, even this figure is uncertain, given the political disputes between the Democratic administration and the Republicans, who have a majority in the House of Representatives and a blocking minority in the Senate.

Albright adds that there are still a number of "unknowns" in the 2014 budget request. "It is clear the budget proposal will face an uphill battle in Congress this summer," he says. "It is our hope that implementing the [redundancy programme] now, rather than waiting for additional details on the 2014 budget, will put the laboratory in a better position to address whatever budget realities we'll face." According to lab spokesperson Lynda Seaver, "the voluntary redundancy is available to all employees, though some could be denied due to critical skills".

Budgeting woes

The lay-offs at LLNL follow more than 550 permanent employees having accepted severance packages last year from the Los Alamos National Laboratory when it faced a reduced budget and little prospect of increases. The LLNL itself offered voluntary redundancies in 2008 but, according to Seaver, did not get "the numbers we had hoped for". The lab then resorted to compulsory redundancies, which some employees challenged in the courts. Indeed, in late May five lab staff were awarded more than $2.7m when a local jury found that the LLNL had violated a contractual promise that it would lay the workers off only for a "reasonable cause". The LLNL will reconsider its response to the impending financial situation – which could still include forced redundancies – as soon as it knows its final budget for 2014.

Meanwhile, further budget woes are threatening the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Alcator C-Mod fusion project, which faces closure within a year as the US government moves fusion funds from home-grown projects to international collaborations such as ITER. The administration's proposed 2014 budget includes no funding for C-Mod and its shutdown would lead to 70 staff losing their jobs, leaving only two fusion experiments in the US. The Massachusetts Congressional delegation has called for restoration of funds for the programme, which produces more PhDs in fusion and plasma physics than at any other US institution.

Researchers in the US and Italy have made the first integrated graphene digital circuits that function at gigahertz frequencies. The circuits are ring oscillators and the work could be an important step towards realizing all-graphene microwave circuits, says the team.

Graphene is a 2D sheet of carbon just one atom thick and it – along with similar 2D materials such as carbon nanotubes and molybdenite – shows great promise for future electronics. This is because electronic devices smaller than 10 nm could be made using these 2D materials – at least in principle. Below the 10 nm length scale, devices based on conventional silicon are expected to be too small to function properly and therefore graphene and similar materials offer a route to making ever-smaller electronic devices.

One major challenge facing those developing such 2D devices is speed. Modern silicon processors operate at microwave (gigahertz) frequencies, as do communications chips in devices such as mobile phones. Therefore, any practical 2D device would have to run just as fast. Until now, however, the fastest 2D device – a carbon-nanotube ring oscillator – operates at a lethargic 50 MHz.

Now, a team led by Roman Sordan of the Politecnico di Milano and Eric Pop of the University of Illinois says it has made the first integrated graphene oscillators – with the added bonus that the devices operate at 1.28 GHz. The graphene ring oscillators also appear to be less sensitive to fluctuations in the supply voltage compared with both conventional silicon CMOS devices and earlier oscillators made from the 2D materials.

Final "missing" component

In addition to being used to generate clock pulses in microprocessors, oscillators are also one of the main building blocks of analogue electronics. Microwave electronics, for example, are based on voltage amplifiers, oscillators and mixers. "Graphene amplifiers and mixers have already been demonstrated, so the oscillators we made represent the final 'missing' component for making all-graphene microwave circuits," Sordan says.

And that is not all. The team has also fabricated stand-alone graphene frequency mixers from its ring oscillators. Previous graphene mixers were not stand-alone because they required external oscillators to function.

"We believe that our study significantly advances research in low-dimensional nanomaterials towards practical, high-speed digital and analogue applications, and we hope that it will motivate significant future work in this direction," says Sordan.

The research is reported in ACS Nano.

Patterns of subtle sounds and pauses may reveal a skeleton of grammar in toddler-speak. CREDIT: ewcastle University

The little sounds and puffs of air that toddlers often inject into their baby babble may actually be subtle stand-ins for grammatical words, new research suggests.

For their study, Cristina Dye, a Newcastle University researcher in child language development, made recordings of tens of thousands of utterances of French-speaking children between 23 and 37 months old.

Dye and her colleagues analyzed each sound the kids made and the context in which it was produced. The team said they documented a pattern of sounds and puffs of air that seemed to replace grammatical words in many cases. Their findings suggest that toddlers may properly use little words (as a, an, can, is, an) sooner than thought.

"Many of the toddlers we studied made a small sound, a soft breath, or a pause, at exactly the place that a grammatical word would normally be uttered," Dye said in a statement.

"The fact that this sound was always produced in the correct place in the sentence leads us to believe that young children are knowledgeable of grammatical words. They are far more sophisticated in their grammatical competence than we ever understood."

Though Dye was studying French-speaking toddlers, she and her colleagues expect their findings to apply to other languages as well. She also thinks their results could have implications for understanding language delay in children.

"When children don't learn to speak normally it can lead to serious issues later in life," Dye said in a statement. "For example, those who have it are more likely to suffer from mental illness or be unemployed later in life. If we can understand what is 'normal' as early as possible then we can intervene sooner to help those children."

Previous research has shown that toddlers, before they articulate full sentences themselves, may be able to understand complex grammar. A 2011 study in the journal Cognitive Science found that as early as 21 months, children could match made-up verbs with a picture that made sense grammatically. For example, if they were told "The rabbit is glorping the duck," they would point to a picture of a rabbit lifting a duck's leg rather than the duck lifting its leg on its own.

The new research on the French-speaking toddlers was detailed in the Journal of Linguistics.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Some futurists predict humans will be able to upload their consciousness to computers in the near future. CREDIT: BrainGate 2, www.braingate2.org

NEW YORK — By 2045, humans will achieve digital immortality by uploading their minds to computers — or at least that's what some futurists believe. This notion formed the basis for the Global Futures 2045 International Congress, a futuristic conference held here June 14-15.

The conference, which is the brainchild of Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, fell somewhere between hardcore science and science fiction. It featured a diverse cast of speakers, from scientific luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis and Marvin Minsky, to Swamis and other spiritual leaders.

In the year 2045

Kurzweil — an inventor, futurist and now director of engineering at Google — predicts that by 2045, technology will have surpassed human brainpower to create a kind of superintelligence — an event known as the singularity. Other scientists have said that robots will overtake humans by 2100. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

According to Moore's law, computing power doubles approximately every two years. Several technologies are undergoing similar exponential advances, from genetic sequencing to 3D printing, Kurzweil told conference attendees. He illustrated the point with a series of graphs showing the inexorable upward climb of various technologies.

By 2045, "based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold," Kurzweil said.

Itskov and other so-called "transhumanists" interpret this impending singularity as digital immortality. Specifically, they believe that in a few decades, humans will be able to upload their minds to a computer, transcending the need for a biological body. The idea sounds like sci-fi, and it is — at least for now. The reality, however, is that neural engineering is making significant strides toward modeling the brain and developing technologies to restore or replace some of its biological functions.

Brain prostheses

Substantial achievements have been made in the field of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs (also called brain-machine interfaces). The cochlear implant — in which the brain's cochlear nerve is electronically stimulated to restore a sense of sound to someone who is hard of hearing — was the first true BCI. Many groups are now developing BCIs to restore motor skills, following damage to the nervous system from a stroke or spinal cord injury.

José Carmena and Michel Maharbiz, electrical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are working to develop state-of-the-art motor BCIs. These devices consist of pill-size electrode arrays that record neural signals from the brain's motor areas, which are then decoded by a computer and used to control a computer cursor or prosthetic limb (such as a robotic arm). Carmena and Maharbiz spoke of the challenge of making a BCI that works stably over time and does not require being tethered to wires.

Theodore Berger, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is taking BCIs to a new level by developing a memory prosthesis. Berger aims to replace part of the brain's hippocampus, the region that converts short-term memories into long-term ones, with a BCI. The device records the electrical activity that encodes a simple short-term memory (such as pushing a button) and converts it to a digital signal. That signal is passed into a computer where it is mathematically transformed and then fed back into the brain, where it gets sealed in as a long-term memory. He has successfully tested the device in rats and monkeys, and is now working with human patients. [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

Mind uploading

The conference took a surreal turn when Martine Rothblatt — a lawyer, author and entrepreneur, and CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics Corp. — took the stage. Even the title of Rothblatt's talk was provocative: "The Purpose of Biotechnology is the End of Death."

Rothblatt introduced the concept of "mindclones" — digital versions of humans that can live forever. She described how the mind clones are created from a "mindfile," a sort of online repository of our personalities, which she argued humans already have (in the form of Facebook, for example). This mindfile would be run on "mindware," a kind of software for consciousness. "The first company that develops mindware will have [as much success as] a thousand Googles," Rothblatt said.

But would such a mindclone be alive? Rothblatt thinks so. She cited one definition of life as a self-replicating code that maintains itself against disorder. Some critics have shunned what Rothblatt called "spooky Cartesian dualism," arguing that the mind must be embedded in biology. On the contrary, software and hardware are as good as wet ware, or biological materials, she argued.

Rothblatt went on to discuss the implications of creating mindclones. Continuity of the self is one issue, because your persona would no longer inhabit just a biological body. Then, there are mind-clone civil rights, which would be the "cause célèbre" for the 21st century, Rothblatt said. Even mindclone procreation and reanimation after death were mentioned.

The quantum world

In parallel with the talk of brain technologies and mind-uploading, much was said about the nature of consciousness in the universe. Physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford and others disagree with the interpretation of the brain as a mere computer. Penrose argued that consciousness is a quantum mechanical phenomenon arising from the fabric of the universe. Those of the "Penrose school" think uploading the brain would have to involve quantum computers — a development unlikely to happen by 2045.

But Itskov thinks otherwise. The 32-year-old president of the Global Future 2045 Congress is dead set on living forever.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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CREDIT: Raw meat photo via Shutterstock

People who increase the amount of red meat in their diet may be at a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a new study of more than 149,000 Americans.

The study researchers found that people who increased their red-meat intake by half a serving per day during a four-year period had a 48-percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next four years compared with people who made no change in their red-meat intake.

Conversely, participants who reduced their red-meat consumption by more than half a serving per day within four years were 14 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes during the subsequent 16 years compared with those who didn't make a red-meat diet change.

Red-meat consumption has been repeatedly linked to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. Red meat has also been associated with higher risks of cancer and heart disease.

However, most previous studies that focused on the relationship between diabetes risk and red-meat intake measured the people's diets only at the beginning of the study, without considering changes in people's eating behaviors over time. [12 Tips for Eating Healthy on a Budget]

In the new study, the researchers measured the diets of 149,000 men and women at the start of the study and then four years later to record how much and how frequently they ate unprocessed red meat and processed products such as bacon and sausage, and whether their intake changed.

Sixteen years later, at the end of the study, the researchers had documented 7,540 new cases of type 2 diabetes. Compared with stable low-level consumers who ate fewer than two servings of red meat per week, people who increased their intake from low to high levels had an almost twofold increase in their risk of diabetes.

Participants who upped their meat consumption from moderate to high levels increased their type 2 diabetes risk from 37 percent to 87 percent, according to the study.

"Our results add further evidence that limiting red-meat consumption over time confers benefits for [type 2 diabetes] prevention," the researchers wrote in their study, which was published today (June 17) in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Adjusting the results for body mass index and weight gain within four years changed the results only modestly, which suggests that gaining weight as a result of higher red-meat consumption may explain part of the results.

About 25.6 million U.S. adults have diabetes, the majority of which is type 2, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The United States is one of largest consumers of meat (including poultry); Americans ate an average of 170 lbs. (77 kilograms) of meat per person in 2011, according to the Earth Policy Institute.

Email Bahar Gholipour or follow her @alterwired. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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CREDIT: Tom Denham.

Diets high in fat and sugar may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease, and a new study may explain why.

In the study, participants who ate a diet high in saturated fat (including lots of beef and bacon) and "high glycemic index" foods (such as white rice and white bread) had an increase in levels of a protein called amyloid-beta in their cerebral spinal fluid. Amyloid-beta is a key component of the brain plaquesthat are a hallmark of Alzheimer's. High glycemic index foods release sugar quickly into the bloodstream.

In contrast, participants who ate a diet low in saturated fat (including fish and chicken) and low in high glycemic index foods (such as whole grains) had a decrease in amyloid-beta in their cerebral spinal fluid.

While previous studies have found that poor diet, obesity and diabetes are linked with an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease, the new study is one of the first to try to explain why, on a biological level, this might occur.

"Diet is a very important factor in determining brain health," said study researcher Suzanne Craft, a professor of medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. "The types of food we eat, particular dietary patterns that happen over long periods of time, are likely to have a substantial impact on our brains to the point where they may either protect or increase your risk of developing late-life brain disease like Alzheimer's disease," Craft said.

However, the study was small and examined the effect of diet over a very short time period — just one month. More research is needed to know whether the increase in amyloid-beta seen in this study would really result in Alzheimer's disease.

In addition, it's not clear if changing their diet would be helpful for people who already have a genetic risk for Alzheimer's.

Brain health and diet

Amyloid-beta normally gets cleared from the brain, and problems with this process may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease, Craft said.

One of the ways amyloid-beta is cleared is when it attaches to a protein called apolipoprotein E. When amyloid-beta is not attached to apolipoprotein E, it is in a "lipid-depleted" (LD) form that is less stable, and more likely to be toxic to the brain, Craft said.

The new study involved 47 adults in their late 60s, about half of whom had mild cognitive impairment, a condition in which people experience noticeable declines in their cognitive function, including memory and language problems.

Participants were randomly assigned to follow a high-fat, high glycemic index diet or a low-fat, low glycemic index for four weeks. Both groups ate the same number of total calories. Samples of cerebral spinal fluid were collected at the beginning and end of the study through a lumbar puncture.

Before participants started the diet, those with mild cognitive impairment had higher levels of LD amyloid-beta compared to those with normal cognition. Levels of LD amyloid-beta were particularly high among adults with mild cognitive impairment who also had a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's (a mutation in a gene called ApoE4.)

After four weeks, those on the high-fat diet saw an increase in LD amyloid-beta levels, while those on the low-fat diet saw a decrease in LD amyloid-beta.

However, those with the ApoE4 mutation, who already had high levels of amyloid beta, did not get any better or worse when on either diet.

"It may be that the diet actually produces the same problem that the genetic risk factor produces," Craft said.

Good for the heart and brain?

A high fat, high glycemic index diet, known to be bad for heart health, can lower levels of the hormone insulin in the brain. Insulin may be involved in the clearance of amyloid-beta from the brain, and thus play a role in Alzheimer's disease, Craft said.

In addition, high levels of "bad" cholesterol in the blood tend to be linked with low levels of in the brain, Craft said.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Electron configuration and elemental properties of xenon.
CREDIT: Greg Robson/Creative Commons, Andrei Marincas | Shutterstock

Word origin: Xenon comes from the Greek term for stranger.

Discovery: The element was discovered by Scottish chemist William Ramsay and English chemist Morris Travers in 1898.

Properties of xenon

Xenon is one of the inert or noble gases. It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless and chemically non-reactive. [See Periodic Table of the Elements]

Prior to 1962, scientists believed that xenon and other noble gases were unable to form compounds. However, evidence shows that xenon can form some compounds including sodium perxenate, xenon deuterate, xenon hydrate, difluoride, tetrafluoride and hexafluoride. Scientists have also produced metallic xenon using several hundred kilobars of pressure. Highly explosive xenon trioxide is another compound that has been prepared. By chemically bonding xenon to fluorine and oxygen, more than 80 compounds have been made. Natural xenon has nine stable isotopes and 20 unstable isotopes. In a gas-filled tube, xenon emits blue or light lavender glow when excited by electrical discharge.

Xenon is a very rare gas. This is a 5-cm vial of glowing ultrapure xenon.
CREDIT: Images of elements

Sources of xenon

Xenon is rare and exists as a trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere to the extent of about one part in 20 million.  This is about the same abundance as on Mars' atmosphere where Xenon is present at 0.08 ppm. The element is also found in gases emitted from some mineral springs. Xenon is only commercially obtained by industrial liquid-air plants that can extract the gas.

Uses of xenon

Xenon is used in photographic flash lamps, stroboscopic lamps, bactericidal lamps, high-intensive arc-lamps for motion picture projection and high-pressure arc lamps to product ultraviolet light.  In nuclear energy, xenon is used in bubble chambers, probes and other applications. Headlights with xenon "blue" and fog lights are used on some vehicles and in very bright lamps used for deep-sea observation. These are said to illuminate better than conventional lights.

(Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory)

CREDIT: Genista via Flickr

(ISNS) -- A rise in fish farms has meant cheap, fast-growing protein to feed the world's growing human population. But a new study suggests that countries located at lower latitudes – many of which rely heavily on fish farming – may be most at risk for fish disease outbreaks. The tropical environments in countries near the equator are ripe for breeding waterborne pathogens. 

Aquaculture, the technical term for the farming of aquatic plants and animals, is the fastest-growing agricultural industry in the world. The term refers to farming in all sorts of water environments, including ponds, rivers, lakes and controlled areas in the ocean. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 90 percent of these fish farms are located in developing countries, which often have warm, tropical environments, conducive to raising fish year-round. 

A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Ecology, however, shows that operations near the equator are also more prone to dangerous and rapid disease outbreaks that could wipe out entire stocks of fish.

Tommy Leung, a lecturer in parasitology and evolutionary biology at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and his colleague Amanda Bates at the University of Tasmania, reviewed 114 previously published reports on disease outbreaks at fish farms from Norway to South America. 

The implications of these findings for developing countries, many of which are located near the equator, could be dire. 

"A lot of these countries are really dependent on aquaculture as a way to have a secure food source, so it provides them with food security, as well as a way of supporting their economy," said Leung.

In their analysis, Leung's team considered the geographical location of the fish farm outbreaks, the severity of the outbreaks, the type of fish or shellfish involved, and the type of farm -- fresh or saltwater, and how the farms were separated from the surrounding waters. They also considered the types of pathogens that caused disease, generally viruses, bacteria or parasites. 

Diseases ranged from skin flukes, which make fish scales appear discolored and peel off, to salmon anemia, a viral disease thought to be carried by sea lice.

The findings showed that the closer the fish farms were to the equator, the more likely they were to have an outbreak and the more severe the outbreaks were compared to fish farms located farther away from the equator. Young fish and shellfish were particularly susceptible to the deadly outbreaks. Leung said, on average, disease outbreaks in tropical areas wipe out 88 percent of the fish in any given stock. This is mainly because diseases tend to breed and spread faster in the warmer waters of the tropics.

In addition, disease is difficult to contain in water. "Unlike on a dairy farm where if you have a sick calf you can put them aside to quarantine them, it's much harder to quarantine in an aquatic environment," said Leung. 

According to Jeffrey Lotz, an aquaculture specialist at the University of Southern Mississippi in Ocean Springs, Miss., diseases will always threaten aquaculture. "Certainly there have been more problems in the tropics but there are disease problems in the [higher] latitudes as well," he explained.  

Lotz said he’s worried about the implications for imports. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the U.S. imports 85 percent of its seafood, more than half of which is from aquaculture operations rather than wild-caught. 

While imported pork, beef and chicken are subject to inspections by the Food and Drug Administration, fish imports don't face the same scrutiny. According to Lotz, the less stringent inspection regulations could allow diseased fish imported from tropical countries onto grocery store shelves in the U.S., potentially posing a threat to public health.

Both Leung and Lotz are concerned about the implications for the future, saying global warming could result in rising temperatures and thus, a rise in the incidence of fish disease across the globe. Lotz said some of the tropical diseases will likely move farther from the equator and the overall prevalence of fish disease will increase, impacting both supply and food safety. 

This story was provided by Inside Science News Service. Tegan Wendland is a science writer in Madison, Wisconsin.

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From the Popular Science archive, the story of Amelia Earhart's historic journey on June 17, 1928.

Amelia Earhart, 1936 Harris Ewing collection via Wikimedia Commons

"First Woman Flies Overseas," republished in full below, originally appeared in the September 1928 issue of Popular Science magazine. On June 17, 1928, 30-year-old Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane.

Amelia Earhart and Lockheed Electra 10E NR16020, cerca 1937 :  via Wikimedia Commons

"The flight of the Friendship is intended to point the road toward the seaplane instead of the land plane as a means of flying across oceans, and multiple-engined planes instead of single-engined. It will help toward more comfortable flying; when women demand planes not only comfortable, but luxurious, men will build them."

Those statements of Miss Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, expressed the true importance of her recent flight, with Wilmer Stultz, pilot, and Lou Gordon, co-pilot, from Trepassey Bay, Newfoundland, to Burry Port, Wales. In less than twenty-two hours they flew 2,000 miles, much of the way through fog.

Amelia Earhart by her Lockheed Electra, with Fred Noonan: Parnamerim airfield, Natal, Brazil.  via Wikimedia Commons

Their machine was a three-motored Fokker seaplane, originally designed for Commander Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expedition. It was the first crossing in a plane equipped with pontoons, on which to float if forced down.

Daring a journey which already had cost the lives of three women, Miss Earhart had planned herself to handle the controls, but fog, and the consequent necessity of flying by instruments alone, prevented that added glory.

Amelia Earhart standing in front of the Lockheed Electra in which she disappeared in July 1937:  Smithsonian Institution via Wikimedia Commons

Click here to see this article as it appeared in the September 1928 issue of Popular Science.

Toggling graphene's magnetic field on and off could lead to faster, smaller electronics.

Magnetic Graphene University of Manchester

Add another point to the list of reasons why graphene, the darling child of material physics, is a wunderkind. A team led by researchers at the University of Manchester has succeeded in turning magnetism on and off in graphene, an important step for the field of spintronics, the study of the way electrons spin in solid-state physics.

Spintronic memory has great theoretical potential to make computers faster and more efficient, but scientists have struggled to switch magnetic fields on and off the way electronic transistors do.

As announced in Nature Communications last week, we might come a little closer to spintronic transistors with graphene. When carbon atoms in graphene's honeycomb-like structure are removed, electrons around the resulting holes form clouds that act like microscopic magnets. The researchers found the electronic clouds could be dissipated and condensed again, switching off the magnetism.

Irina Grigorieva, who directed the study, explained the achievement in a press statement:

This breakthrough allows us to work towards transistor-like devices in which information is written down by switching graphene between its magnetic and non-magnetic states. These states can be read out either in the conventional manner by pushing an electric current through or, even better, by using a spin flow. Such transistors have been a holy grail of spintronics.

Another co-author, Antonio Castro Neto of the Graphene Research Centre in Singapore, added that this could lead to a new type of magnetic device that would be as thin as a single carbon atom. "These new devices can be incorporate [sic] in electronic circuits in order to create functionalities for control of magnetism and charge that did not exist before. They unify magnetic memories with electric circuits," he said in the statement.