Light striking this detector liberates electrons from some of the silicon atoms, producing an electrical signal that is converted by the chip's electronics into a picture.

ECONOMIST: Camera-phones

That is the goal at a shop a few miles down the road from U.S. Genomics, at Harvard, where biophysicist Daniel Branton and colleagues hope to design a better detector by passing DNA, one letter at a time, through a microscopic "nanopore" in a silicon membrane.

FORBES: Health