Within the decade you may be storing your media library, health and financial history, and every bit of data relevant to your life on a device smaller than a staple. When it happens, you can thank a handful of scientists racing to cram ever more data storage bits into smaller spaces. The front-runner is Andreas Heinrich, a nanotechnologist at IBM's Almaden Research Center. This winter he coaxed a cluster of 12 iron atoms to store one bit of data, consisting of either a 1 or a 0. Todays hard drives require about a million atoms to store one bit. Heinrich did it by painstakingly using a microscope fitted with a tool to move the atoms into a formation. The arrangement induced each atom to take on a magnetic charge opposite that of its neighbor. This checkerboard configuration allowed far tighter packing than in current hard drives, where atoms of the same charge repel each other.
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