Number 308 (Story #3), February 20, 1997 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein A ROOM-TEMPERATURE SINGLE-ELECTRON MEMORY has been developed at the University of Minnesota. In electronics, smaller usually means faster response, less power consumption, and greater component density. In the tiny Minnesota transistor a bit of information is stored in the form of a single extra electron which, resident on a dot of silicon (acting as a "floating gate"), has the power to influence the current flow in a silicon channel connecting the transistor's source and drain. This single-electron arrangement is orders of magnitude smaller than the kind of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor used in conventional computer memories. (Lingjie Guo et al., Science, 31 January 1997.)