Stochastic effects dominate most processes at the nanometer length scale and provide rich and interesting physics that can be exploited for new devices and applications. I will discuss a few of the projects I have worked on that take advantage of the unique electronic and structural properties of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs), including the selective detection of biological molecules of interest through polymer design, the in vivo detection of nitric oxide in melanoma cells, and the detection of single-ion transport events through the inside of a SWCNT. All of these applications benefit from recent advances in computational chemistry methods, from quantum-scale electronic calculations to large-scale, coarse-grained molecular mechanics simulations.