Multitasking has a price: Your computer is sucking up a lot of
electricity keeping track of work you haven't yet saved to the
hard drive. Americans spend $6 billion a year on electricity to
keep that data stored in a computer's memory during operation.
But that figure could drop sharply, scientists report this week,
thanks to a new type of material than can permanently store such
data—without needing a continuous trickle of electricity to do
it. Standard desktop computers rely on two types of memory
technology to store streams of 1s and 0s that make up binary
data. The computer’s hard disk stores data as strips of magnetic
orientation recorded on a magnetic disk: Imagine billions of
patches of compass needles pointing either north or south, each
representing a 1 or a 0. Because this magnetic orientation
endures until it's deliberately switched, this type of memory is
stable—it doesn’t require any added electricity to maintain it.
The second type of memory, however, does. This is Random Access
Memory (RAM), or