I found this article on NBCbayarea.com via Digg.com.
Scientists at UC Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst may have found a way to greatly increase the storage capabilities of electronic devices.
According to John Boitnott's article, Cal officials called the technique "innovative and easily implemented."
"The density achievable with the technology we've developed could potentially enable the contents of 250 DVDs to fit onto the surface the size of a quarter," said co-lead investigator and UC Berkeley assistant professor Ting Xu.
Achieving this technology requires crystals to be heated to between 2.372 and 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours! In doing so, the scientists were able to create defect-free arrays of nanoscopic elements with feature sizes as small as 3 nanometers, translating into densities of 10 terabits per square inch.
I don't even think that I own 250 DVDs, but this technology sounds amazing! An entire TV series could be saved onto something the size of a dime! But this technology will go far beyond DVDs and will factor into the way we store information on all types of electronic devices. I think that there will probably be, however, many more years of research before we see this technology become a part of our lives.
A joint patent on this technology has been filed by UC Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst. The article also states that the U.S Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation helped support the research on this project.
A bit more about Digg.com:
Digg is a site that I visit about everyday. What's great about it is that everything featured on the site, whether it be news, images, or videos, is submitted by the site's users. The number of people "digging" what they like determines whether or not it will make it to the site's front page. Most of the material featured on the site is technology or media related.
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