Using this new data storage technique, you could fit the entire Library of Congress on a cube smaller than a dust mite—or the size of George Washington's pupil on a one dollar bill. A team of nanoscientists led by Sander Otte at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has just unveiled the densest method ever developed to store re-writable digital data. By scooting around individual chlorine atoms on a flat sheet of copper, the scientists could write a 1 kilobyte message at 500 terabits per square inch. That's around 100 times more info per square inch than the most efficient hard drive ever created. Otte says the method could theoretically fit every book ever written onto a flat copper sheet the size of a postage stamp. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a21877/data-storage-breakthrough-chlorine-atoms/
I remember, as a kid, stopping by Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe in Seattle, to view the Lord's Prayer inscribed on a grain of rice. It's still there, as I recall. This isn't quite the same thing. To the other, this one is going to take some work. I wonder what the actual data durability is. Which raises another question: What is maximum data durability? On the low end, hard drives are easily disrupted, and CDRs lose data integrity after a short period of years. Other optical storage offers better durability, but I do wonder what our practical and theoretical maxima are.
They must be bumping up against quantum constraints at the scale of individual atoms, so maybe it only works for surrealist literature.
