A molecule-sized switch just 50 nanometers wide may someday control microscopic machines and also could make DNA sequencing faster, less expensive, and more precise.

A new version of a biological computer has been built using DNA molecules and enzymes that can run up to a billion different programs simultaneously.

Scientists have developed what they say could become the world's smallest medical kit: a computer, made of DNA, that can diagnose disease and automatically dispense medicine to treat it. The computer, so small that one trillion would fit into a drop of water, now works only in a test tube, and it could be decades before something like it is ready for practical use. But it offers an intriguing glimpse of a future in which molecular machines operate inside people, spotting diseases and treating them before noticeable symptoms even appear.

DNA computing has the potential to perform trillions of calculations at once and the size and the ease of interfacing with living material may make them ideal for use in medicine. But bio-molecular computers must await a breakthrough in designer enzymes.

Israeli scientists have devised a computer made from DNA that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC.

Popular Science surveys the efforts of researchers to develop new, post-silicon methods of computing that would be millions of times faster than current models. Focuses on nano-scale, DNA, and quantum computing.

A DNA-based computer has solved a logic problem that no person could complete by hand, setting a new milestone for this infant technology that could someday surpass the electronic digital computer in certain areas.

Israeli scientists have built a DNA computer so tiny that a trillion of them could fit in a test tube and perform a billion operations per second with 99.8 percent accuracy.
Instead of using figures and formulas to solve a problem, the microscopic computer's input, output and software are made up of DNA molecules -- which store and process encoded information in living organisms.

A computer so small that a trillion of its kind fit into a test tube has been developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. The nanocomputer consists of DNA and DNA-processing enzymes, both dissolved in a liquid.

One of the oldest forms of life on Earth has been revealed as a natural born computer programmer. Scientists studying single-celled organisms called ciliates have found that the tiny animals are experts at sorting, shuffling and splicing DNA when they reproduce.