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" The need for more computing\u00A0data\u00A0is constantly pressing. Amazon&amp;#039;s Jeff Bezos has\u00A0compared Amazon&amp;#039;s cloud memory program as equivalent to a public utility, like a power plant, and Google has been suspected of creating floating barges of data centers. People constantly need more,\u00A0and researchers in the Netherlands\u00A0have made a crucial breakthrough in getting the people what they want: all the memory they want, stored at an atomic level.\u00A0 Atom-sized memory was first theorized by the famed physicist Richard Feynman in 1959. In a now-famous speech titled &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,&amp;quot; Feynman asked his audience of physicists to think as small as possible, to ask why they couldn&amp;#039;t write the entire\u00A0Encyclopedia Britannica\u00A0on the head of a pin. &amp;quot;What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want?&amp;quot; he asked.\u00A0 It&amp;#039;s a question the Otte Lab at Delft University of Technology is dedicated to answering. With a slogan of &amp;quot;creating matter atom-by-atom,&amp;quot; the Lab focuses on the manipulation of individual atoms. Nano-storage is just one of their areas of research, and in being able to store a kilobyte of memory on a surface of\u00A096 nanometers by 126 nanometers, they&amp;#039;ve moved the concept forward in a major way. Data comes to down to ones and zeroes, after all. Atomic storage means that the Otte Lab has reduced the switches for\u00A0those ones and zeroes to\u00A096 nanometers by 126 nanometers, just about as small as Feynman or anyone else has ever envisioned.\u00A0 In all the discussion of size\u00A0it was crucial for the Otte Lab to prove that this system also functions like normal memory we see and use now, with the capability to rewritten. They proved that by\u00A0storing\u00A0text from Feynman&amp;#039;s speech, and then, in a poetic touch acknowledging the evolution of nano-storage,\u00A0rewriting the memory\u00A0with an excerpt of Darwin&amp;#039;s\u00A0Origin of the Species. &amp;quot;There is no physical limitation that prevents the fabrication of much larger atomic memories,&amp;quot; the team reports, which means that even though this test only used a kilobyte of memory\u00A0the sky could potentially be the limit.\u00A0The word petabyte, meaning one million gigabytes, could become common parlance.\u00A0For example:\u00A0the entire Library of Congress, which is\u00A0three petabytes\u00A0or several million GB,\u00A0could fit in a\u00A0cube the size of\u00A0100 micrometers.\u00A0\u00A0A high definition Netflix movie takes up\u00A02,400 MB;\u00A0decades&amp;#039; worth of movies\u00A0could fit in a ring on your finger. Expect\u00A0Feynman&amp;#039;s basic question\u2014if the laws of physics permit it, why don&amp;#039;t\u00A0we do it?\u2014to get asked over and over again as this technology develops. At this rate, it&amp;#039;s only a matter of time before we\u00A0squeeze all of human knowledge down to the size of a floppy. Source: New Scientist "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20519/atomic-memory-makes-computer-storage-small/>