I know and you know that today is September 11. I just want to quote Dan Gillmor, from the San Jose Mercury News, who wrote a column named "Getting on with life aboard plane home."
Like many of us, I plan to pause today at 8:46 a.m. New York time, to offer a quiet prayer for amity in a troubled world and to hope that the families and friends of the Sept. 11 victims are finding some measure of personal peace. I will never forget the barbarism of that day, nor the response from men and women who reminded us what courage really means. And I will remind myself that risks of varying kinds are part of life.
Then I'll then get on with my day. As will we all. As we must.
I agree completely, so let's move forward with our topic for today.
A workable atomic memory that uses individual atoms to store information has been developed by physicists for the first time.
"The difference between a one and a zero is represented by a single atom," says Franz Himpsel of the University of Wisconsin.
Current hard drives use millions of atoms to store each individual bit of information. In contrast, the new system could be used to squeeze millions of times more data on to a disk of comparable size.
Ready for big numbers? Here we go.
This represents a density equivalent to 250 terabits of data per square inch, although only a few dozen bits were actually stored in the demonstration.
As you can guess, this technology will not be available before a long time -- if it comes one day.
Himpsel says it took minutes to write a few hundred bits of information using the microscope. Compared to current speeds, this method "is so far off the mark, it will have a hard time ever making it," he says.
Source: Will Knight, New Scientist, September 10, 2002
6:11:47 PM
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