Nanoelectromechanical systems were fabricated from single- and multilayer graphene sheets by mechanically exfoliating thin sheets from graphite over trenches in silicon oxide. Vibrations with fundamental resonant frequencies in the megahertz range are actuated either optically or electrically and detected optically by interferometry. We demonstrate room-temperature charge sensitivities down to 8 x 10(-4) electrons per root hertz. The thinnest resonator consists of a single suspended layer of atoms and represents the ultimate limit of two-dimensional nanoelectromechanical systems.

Since the divergence of humans and chimpanzees about 5 million years ago, these species have undergone a remarkable evolution with drastic divergence in anatomy and cognitive abilities. At the molecular level, despite the small overall magnitude of DNA sequence divergence, we might expect such evolutionary changes to leave a noticeable signature throughout the genome. We here compare 13,731 annotated genes from humans to their chimpanzee orthologs to identify genes that show evidence of positive selection. Many of the genes that present a signature of positive selection tend to be involved in sensory perception or immune defenses. However, the group of genes that show the strongest evidence for positive selection also includes a surprising number of genes involved in tumor suppression and apoptosis, and of genes involved in spermatogenesis. We hypothesize that positive selection in some of these genes may be driven by genomic conflict due to apoptosis during spermatogenesis. Genes with maximal expression in the brain show little or no evidence for positive selection, while genes with maximal expression in the testis tend to be enriched with positively selected genes. Genes on the X chromosome also tend to show an elevated tendency for positive selection. We also present polymorphism data from 20 Caucasian Americans and 19 African Americans for the 50 annotated genes showing the strongest evidence for positive selection. The polymorphism analysis further supports the presence of positive selection in these genes by showing an excess of high-frequency derived nonsynonymous mutations.

Comparisons of DNA polymorphism within species to divergence between species enables the discovery of molecular adaptation in evolutionarily constrained genes as well as the differentiation of weak from strong purifying selection. The extent to which weak negative and positive darwinian selection have driven the molecular evolution of different species varies greatly, with some species, such as Drosophila melanogaster, showing strong evidence of pervasive positive selection, and others, such as the selfing weed Arabidopsis thaliana, showing an excess of deleterious variation within local populations. Here we contrast patterns of coding sequence polymorphism identified by direct sequencing of 39 humans for over 11,000 genes to divergence between humans and chimpanzees, and find strong evidence that natural selection has shaped the recent molecular evolution of our species. Our analysis discovered 304 (9.0%) out of 3,377 potentially informative loci showing evidence of rapid amino acid evolution. Furthermore, 813 (13.5%) out of 6,033 potentially informative loci show a paucity of amino acid differences between humans and chimpanzees, indicating weak negative selection and/or balancing selection operating on mutations at these loci. We find that the distribution of negatively and positively selected genes varies greatly among biological processes and molecular functions, and that some classes, such as transcription factors, show an excess of rapidly evolving genes, whereas others, such as cytoskeletal proteins, show an excess of genes with extensive amino acid polymorphism within humans and yet little amino acid divergence between humans and chimpanzees.

Using an atomic force microscope, we measured effective spring constants of stacks of graphene sheets ͑less than 5͒ suspended over photolithographically defined trenches in silicon dioxide. Measurements were made on layered graphene sheets of thicknesses between 2 and 8 nm, with measured spring constants scaling as expected with the dimensions of the suspended section, ranging from 1 to 5 N / m. When our data are fitted to a model for doubly clamped beams under tension, we extract a Young's modulus of 0.5 TPa, compared to 1 TPa for bulk graphite along the basal plane, and tensions on the order of 10 −7 N.