Fun Fact #581

September 19, 2008

During on the talks I attended this past week at the Nano-Bio conference (UW-Madison), one of the speakers made a remark that I found pretty incredible. He said that humans have made more transistors than bricks. Really? So I looked it up and found this from Mark Hill, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"We make over a billion transistors/second. One transistor per man/woman/child 10 seconds (humankind has made many more transistors than bricks!)"

And according to Yusuf Leblebici of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, transistors are the "most of abundant man-made object on earth."

If nanotechnology is ever harnessed to supplant the computer chip, we're sure gonna have a lot of nanotubes on our hands.

Photo: Yellow Dog Productions