A breakthrough by scientists from the University of Glasgow could see the storage capacity grow by 150,000 times for the same amount of surface area.  To put this into perspective, 160 Petabytes could theoretically fit on the disk that is now in an iPod.

This is a nanotechnology breakthrough where researchers tell us they:

“assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32 nm apart so that they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule-based switch that can be easily manipulated using an electric field. By taking these nano-scale clusters, just a nanometer in size, and placing them onto a gold or carbon, we can control the switching ability. Not only is this a new type of switchable molecule, but by grafting the molecule on to metal (gold) or carbon means that we can potentially bridge the gap between traditional semiconductor devices and components for nanoscale plastic electronics. The key advantage of the molecule sized switch is information / transistor density in traditional semi-conductors.  Molecule sized switches would lead to increasing data storage to say 4 Petabits per square inch.”

I could have said it better, not.  The geniuses behind this are Professor Lee Cronin and Dr Malcolm Kadodwala.

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