A startling headline, no doubt:

Self-assembling computer circuits, who needs God?

And a pretty amazing story to go with it:

On a cross between physics, chemistry, biology and what some could possibly call blasphemy, European scientists have developed a self-assembling integrated circuit, an important step towards the ultimate goal: self-assembling computers.

According to Geoff Brumfiel in Nature, a team of European physicists has developed an integrated circuit that can build itself. Today, the building of computer chips is slowly pushed to the limit. Computer chips are made by etching patterns onto wafers made of semiconductors. The details of these patterns are no more than a few tens of nanometres. For us humans, it is nearly impossible to realize how small this is. There are 1,000 millimetres in one metre (25.4 in one inch), there are 1,000 micrometres in one millimetre and there are 1,000 nanometres in one micrometre. In other words, there are 1 billion nanometres in a metre or one million in a millimetre. Current technology is really getting to the limit, therefore other methods have to be found.

Dago de Leeuw, a researcher at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, thinks that the most obvious solution is to let these circuits build themselves. We know that this is possible, since nature is chock-full of self-assembling machines: microbes, plants and animals, including humans. This is done via our genetic code that steers the entire process. In order to create truly self-assembling computers, scientists must come up with an entire new but similar system that would be able to get insulators, conductors and semiconductors to automatically link to each other. According to de Leeuw, this is still a long way off.

Nevertheless, the team has made a first step, and as usual, the first steps are the hardest ones to take. They took quinquethiophene, a long organic molecule with mobile electrons that acts like a semiconductor. They attached it to a long carbon chain, terminated by a silicon group. The silicon group acts as an anchor.

They then took a circuit board with preprinted electrodes and immersed it in a solution of these new molecules. Billions of molecules hooked on to an insulating layer between the electrodes. As a result, they formed connections through which a current could flow.

"The different molecules are like little bricks," says Edsger Smits, another researcher at Philips. "Frankly it worked much better than we expected."

But then come to think of it, I don't really see how that headline, or the article's opening sentence, go with the story at all. Self-assembling machines aren't considered blasphemous in any religion I've ever heard of. I suppose there might be some nature religions which take offense at all machines and which therefore might consider a self-assembling machine to be particularly egregious.

But then shouldn't the headline read, "Who Needs a Goddess?"

I guess the reporter needed a hook, and wanted to come up with something more original than the standard "The machines are taking over" line.

I suppose we should be grateful for that. Still, he might consider another really fresh approach: simply reporting positive developments as positive developments. It could work.