Yes, you heard me right. A breakthrough in technology is likely to increase the storage capacity of electronic devices like MP3 players by a factor of almost hundred and fifty thousand. As I always say more the better!

Currently a state of the art player will hold about forty thousand songs. To make another comparison today’s best 3.5 inch hard drives can hold about one terabyte of data. But if promise of this discovery holds true, 500 terabyte disks are on the horizon.

Key discovery is a switch the size of a molecule or fraction of a nanometer. This allows the stored data to be retrieved ands stored without increasing the size of the gadget using the storage. Switch consists of two banks of molecules placed 0.32 of a nanometer apart from each other on a carbon or gold plane. This in theory allows for 1 billion transistors to be placed on a single microchip.

Discovery published in respected scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology was made by Lee Cronin and Malcolm Kadodwala, chemistry professors at Glasgow University in UK, assisted by researchers at Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, UK, which houses Synchrotron, a huge radiation source.

Utility of this breakthrough will of course extend well beyond their possible use in music players to all electronic devices. Everyone will get more power and storage.

This is also radical in that it there is no need for fragile silicon, the staple semi conducting material in all modern chips. It may be possible for these switches to be planted on plastic, since they work with carbon, thus allowing greater flexibility to the whole field.