Carbon country [Back Story].

Max Shulaker and his colleagues made a splash in 2013 when they published a paper in Nature that described the first computer to use carbon-nanotube transistors. But, as with many research projects, that paper was the product of a lot of hard, unglamorous work. Months earlier, for example, team members pulled an all-nighter packing and moving test equipment, including a probe station [above], about 30 miles north, from their base at Stanford to the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. The team had been invited to perform a live demonstration of a handshaking robot that uses carbon-nanotube circuitry, and they needed the gear to connect those circuits to the outside world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]