Interested In Science?

Sorry for the recent hiatus on this site - a move in office and residence has yielded little time to find interest in the world of science, extracurricular or otherwise!

I’ll get back on it as soon as I can, probably by the weekend.

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This may sound like madness, but IBM are on the way to discovering how to use single atoms (!) and molecules to store pieces of data. Thus the transistor on computer chips of today is being shrunk to a 1000th of the size!

This is being made possible by the virtue of something called anisotropy, which pertains to a property dependent on direction; in this case a magnetisation effect also referred to through a quantum dynamic property as spin. Due to the spin quantum number of any atom essentially being either up or down (i.e. 1 or 0…ringing any bells??) this property can be exploited towards the storage of binary data!

For more on this break-through read up at ScientificAmerican.com.