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Individual Atom Memory Created
azav writes "University of Wisconsin-Madison Scientists have created "atomic scale" memory using individual atoms of Silicon." A cool photo can be found on the site as well.
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Single atom memory? How stable do they REALLY expect that to be?
Ha! What's the name of the technology? Alzheimer's Access Memory?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those
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Business plan:
1. Make atomic memory thingy
2. ?????
3. Profit
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This story is a repeat
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There is a spelling mistake in the article
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How long before the site is slashdotted
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This is *not* a troll!!! The moderators are well out of order
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Why don't we have a slashdot poll:
What is best:
(*) Atomic memory
(*) Magnetic storage
(*) Optical storage
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How long before it is patented?
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This is NOT news!!! How could you possibly put this on the front page, and yet you rejected my posts about Buffy and Microsoft doing something wrong, the moderators are well out of order.
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Now that we have got all those over with in one go, can the trollers just shut up, and leave us alone - PLEASE? I think I covered eveything, but I'm sure I'll be corrected if not.
.. not to be too repetitive, but this was posted only a month ago..
0 8/0116255&mode=thread&tid=126
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/
Gives an image of Twanee Stone!
I get it, and you don't. Loser.
What the hell did they write to it? I think I can see a naked lady in there...
Oh, nevermind, my browser window is translucent, and the pr0n site from one of my other window was coming through..
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
about moore's law?
And a brick wall?
Methinks there is no higher density than bit-per-atom.
hrm... bit per electron...
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Professor Farnsworth! Come Quickly!
"If you can read this, you're WAAAY too close!"
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
As a matter of fact, yes.
Not all atoms are the same size. Remember what you learned about atomic weights?
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
"Reading the memory consists of a simple, one-dimensional scan, because it is self-formatted into precise tracks. There is no need to search in two dimensions for the location of a bit. The signal is highly predictable since all atoms have the same shape and occur on well-defined lattice sites. That allows for a high level of filtering and error correction"
"Writing is more difficult. While atoms can be positioned controllably at liquid helium temperature, that is much harder to achieve that at room temperature"
You just have to start storing multiple states in one atom. The Quantum Computing people have been talking about that for years.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
May the year 5763 be a happy and healthy year for all the Jews,
and for that little bit of Jew in each and every one of us!
'Hi-res 200 dpi', the link reads.
Individual atoms visible on a 200 dpi scale? Whow! Let me fire up my 600dpi scanner to study the patterns of electrons!
since we'll have enough memory capacity, we might be able to replicate states of electrons in our brain, in (atom) binary and compare instances... who knows what we'll find out, maybe we'll see every 2 seconds a similar structure (ie. sex?)
if I licked my finger and rubbed ...
Last time i checked same happens to the good old fassioned floopy disk..
I guess the scientist were surprised to find that the atoms stayed where they were left
Exactly. Verry slow at present but being able to keep the atoms where they were put is a step towards a viable atomic storage.
So someone found a way to spend a lot of time using the electron microscope...
Yes electron microscopes have been used to move atoms before. The breakthrough (ignoring the fact it was posted a month ago) is that the self creating tracks and the fact the atoms can be packed at high density and stay there.
On an offtopic side note:
There seems to be an abnormally high number of Trolls on this paticular story. Any ideas why??
Orthanc
Just as long as you don't arrange atoms in a way that could, using some sort of algorithm, produce a recording of some popular music. Otherwise, the RIAA's nano-bots, will deconstruct your atoms.. with permission of the US government
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
..solve chess! :)
Karma. Moderation. Is my
"Last time i checked same happens to the good old fassioned floopy disk.."
no no, with a floppy disk you just have to stick it in your pocket, 9/10 it will corrupt. Thats why i'm sad enough to duplicate all my files on floppy's and sometimes use 2 different disks. Im sure you could probably duplicate the atomic memory too, it would still be amazing density even at half capacity, even at 1/10 capacity. They can decrease the duplication as the technology for better reliability increases.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Remember how it was possible to get old mainframe hard disks to walk across the floor with certain access patterns?
Remember how it was possible to heat up magnetic core memory with certain access patterns?
What is going to happen when you can make atoms randomly vibrate at will???
Doesn't it freak you out that the picture on the site looks kind of like a punched card???
In 1959, physics icon Richard Feynman predicted that all the words written in the history of the world could be contained in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide.
And then we'd need a new search engine just to find the damn thing.
Fortunately, the text would probably be stored in the innovative MS Word format, which guarantees that the physical size of the required storage capacity will remain constant over time, no matter what the information density of the storage medium.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Fact: *BSD is dying
So are you, once I find you.
Bartender replies "Are you sure?"
Atom thinks for a second: "Yea I'm positive."
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
So what would be better, an egg carton or atmoic storage? The only difference is the scale? Well, that difference is huge!
I had an incredibly insightfull and informative post to make, but I stored it on an atomic scale memory smaller than a spec of dust. Now I can't remember where I put it.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Its not a hoax. > Not all atoms are the same size. Remember what you learned about atomic weights? True. But how is your logic? Just because there exists atoms of different weights does not mean you cannot have a group of atoms of the same weights.
I found a remarkable proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but this 512 terabyte memory cube is too small to contain it.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Actually, they are all rougly the same size, regardless of atomic weight. This is one of the interesting things about quantum mechanics and atomic physics. *All* atoms are between 0.5 and 2.5 Angstroms (1e-10 m)with Cesium being the largest (bigger than Uranium) and Nitrogen? being the smallest. Silicon isn't very large, however. This is partially because the electrons are so far away from a VERY tiny nucleus (remember the football field/grain of salt analogy).
$ solvechess
Please prepare and format 10 Dyson Spheres and fill them with crystalline silicon.
Please insert Dyson Sphere 1 and press enter...
Working..........(10%)
Please insert Dyson Sphere 2 and press enter...
Working...(13%), inf remaining.
Fun, fun, fun. And now we'll put those into a RAID 6+6. How many would you need at least and how many could fail before you lose any data? For bonus points, give the smallest possible distance you could leave between the spheres to keep them separated using no more than the power output of a Sol-like star on each and calculate the mass of all spheres combined. If possible draw a small diagram of how the spheres had to be placed for maximum stability.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Since most operating systems are 16 and 32 bit in nature, why do we continue to use binary memory? Why not have memory that can somehow represent 16 or 32 states?
If those are silicon atoms in the photo then what are the grooves in between the rows of atoms?
I know the secrets of the video game champs
If the picture is of atoms, what is under them?
I've always wondered that when I see an electron shot like this. Anyone know?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
great minds...
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
could a woodchuck chuck,
if a woodchuck could chuck atoms
+3 Good effort.
It started out pretty good, but it starts to fall apart and seems a bit contrived in spots. You have a good idea here, so try to polish it up.
For one thing, this has been posted already. If I remember correctly, I belive the problem was that they couldn't write to it at any reasonable speed.
http://www.mistersampo.com
Actually, they are all rougly the same size, regardless of atomic weight. This is one of the interesting things about quantum mechanics and atomic physics. *All* atoms are between 0.5 and 2.5 Angstroms (1e-10 m)with Cesium being the largest (bigger than Uranium) and Nitrogen? being the smallest. Silicon isn't very large, however.
Hydrogen's the smallest, according to my books, with a radius of something like 0.53 angstroms (been a while since I looked it up).
What confuses me is why the atomic radii don't go up as the square of the number of shells. The alkali metals will have a single electron in the outermost shell, with the nucleus shielded by the inner shells, and so having an apparent charge of one. This seems to give a system with size equivalent to the nth energy level of an electron in hydrogen, which goes up as the square of the shell number.
I and the friends I asked about this speculate that because the electrons in the sheilding shells are smeared out radially, the outermost shielding shell extends past the valence shell's nominal radius, and so the core is only partly shielded, but I haven't seen any description to date of how you work out what the radii actually end up being.
Any pointers/quick explanations?
Someone (one of the few people who made an *intelligent* reply, anyway) Mentioned memory density. Out of curiosity I decided to figure out exactly how much data per square inch you could fit using this tecnique... Silicon has a van der Waals (minimum, non-bonding) radius of 210pm, or 2.1e-10 meters (8.27e-9 inches). That means the closest you could possibly pack them is 4.2e-10 meters on-center (1.65e-8 inches). That means you can pack about 60,400,000 silicon atoms in single file, or a whopping 3,600,000,000,000,000 atoms per square inch! That boils down to about 415.7 terabytes! Comparatively, current holographic memory systems can (last I checked) reliably store up to 25.6 megabytes per square inch, but of course it has the added feature of using the full volume of the media, and extreamely fast read/write times. =Smidge=
... er, I wasn't going to look at it long enuf to decide how old she appeared... at least not at work.
You could've hired me.
There's a PDF of the real journal article available from Nanotechnology's site.
In the article they say that their atomic memory has an energy density of 250 terabits per square inch (compared to 100 gigabits per square inch for a hard drive). A CD-ROM has 14 square inches of recordable area. If one were to use this technique on a surface the size of a CD-ROM, that would give:
(14 square inches) * (250 terabits/square inch) / (8 bits/byte) = 437.5 terabytes
Incredibly huge, but I'm sure there's a number of people who would still be able to fill it up.
I hate it when all the guys bring their girlfriends to the LAN-Parties.
actually all atoms are roughly the same size, hydrogens nucleus has little pull on its electron so the shell is relatively far out from the nucleus, but a massive atom such as uranium has the shell, relatively, closer in, the charges in a stable atom may be equal, but the positive charge is all concentrated in the center and acts on the electrons individually, brining them closer in, but of course if u wanna get weird, all atoms are theoretically infinite (heisenberg)
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
For those who missed it, their 778 gigabyte database of the complete Awari game tree could be stored on a piece of silicon approximately 4mm square. Wait, that's just on one side! Sweet, we'll keep MP3s on the other 778 gig side.
(0.778 terabytes) / ((250 terabits/sq.inch) / (8 bits/byte)) = 0.024896 sq.inch =~ 4mm square
TROLL?! You fucking people are idiots. You can't understand that these "scientists" are just moving atoms around the way you move your coffee cup on a table. BIG FUCKING DEAL. Gawd why do I ever post here? The IQ of the people in charge should be measured in Kelvins.
Here's my bet. I can FORGE 3 press releases that Slashdot will pick up in the next three months. That is how fucking stupid you people are. You can't tell science from science-fiction. You probably don't even know what an electron microscope IS.
I am not kidding, IBM did this 5 years ago, who gives a fuck if they can move atoms with an electron microscope?! That is exactly what this variety of EM does! Am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that they made atom-sized channels?
You people are jackasses, plain and simple. You probably own miles of swampland in florida and a medicine cabinet full of penis enlargement pills.
Cos atoms have a habit of moving about.
Deleted
Well if you read the article, they evaporated gold on silicon and then more silicon on that. That is the substrate ("what is under them").
The reason it looks so flat is because you get a picture of an electron cloud from an electron microscope. You can't see the nucleus, it's a tiny point inside that fuzzy mess of electrons. So when you pack a bunch of conducting or semi-conducting atoms together, their electron clouds all join up, electrons go promiscuously from atom to atom, and the net appearance is one giant, flat electron cloud.
If you could somehow do a 3-D picture of a tiny ball of gold, it would just look like a sphere, because the electrons are all shared, and they would spread out evenly over the surface of the ball.
Remember they are bouncing electrons off the sample to make the picture. Like charges repel (negative in this case) so the electrons bounce off as soon as they get very close to another electron. That's why you see a picture of the electron clouds of the atoms. The atoms "reflect" the incoming electrons the way a big ship bounces radar signals. You see the outline of the ship (or the electron cloud) as the case may be.
Okay there is one more difference. I can move eggs in the cartons at the rate of maybe 20/min, and the cost is the price of the eggs.
You can have your "memory device" and several million dollars of lab equipment, and you can perform the same operation at maybe 5/hour.
So I am moving the data 360 times faster for 0.000000000001 times the cost.
Also, we have this thing called transistor memory, it has actually been around for a while, and it makes both these crackheaded schemes foolish. Maybe you've heard of it?
My point is: There is way to move the atoms, OR detect their positions, in any manner that could be considered useful or reasonable. Further, there is NO PLAN OR IDEA for how this could be accomplished. No one is "working on" a system to do this, because no one has *an idea of how to do this*.
I am not saying it will never happen, but I am saying it will not happen in your children's lifetimes.
Exactly. Verry slow at present but being able to keep the atoms where they were put is a step towards a viable atomic storage.
I was trying to think of some reason this was news. That was the only reason I could think of. It's really not much of a reason.
And to reiterate, the problem is NOT the temperature! The problem is that NO ONE KNOWS how to move those atoms OR read those atoms AT any meaningful speed. If you want super-small data storage whose transfer rates are measured in bits/hour, you've found your system!
Until someone *thinks of an idea" (because no such idea has been supposed with any more reality than a photon torpedo) for how to do this, it's just guys futzing with their EM. And that is hardly worthy as news.
As for the TROLL rating, fuck Slashdot's stupid fucking articles and their stupid fucking moderators. You will see my point when they post my first raudulent press release as an item.
The responses are perfectly matched to the quality of the original item.
1. How do you measure IQ in Kelvins? If you're suggesting that people's IQ here is room temperature as measured in Kelvins... thank you. Guess most of us (except you, of course) have IQs in the 300s 2. Its not about moving electrons, its about positioning them and keeping them there. 3. You can't measure area of swampland in miles. That would be suqare miles. 4. My penis is large enough, thank you. 5. I don't know how you did it, but you've just demonstrated a NEGATIVE IQ!!!!!
Wow you must be the guy who offered up this gem, huh?
I'd like to hear the genius moderators explain the size savings when the include the these items in the "storage device":
1. Vaccum pump to maintain data integrity.
2. Liquid nitrogen cooling system to maintain data integrity
3. Scanning EM to read the data.
4. EM force probe to write the data.
Let's see, that should all fit in... a two car garage.
Let's compare to an abacus:
1. human being and way to get them food
2. abacus
That should easily fit in a one-car garage, and it works 1000s of times faster.
Relative cost? Maybe 10 USD for the abacus startup, and 10 USD per hour for the operator. Throw in food (we are GOOD employers) and you go up to maybe 13 USD per hour.
Okay, maybe 300, 000 USD for each of the EM, 80, 000 USD for the cooling system, 20,000 USD for the vaccuum system. So that's about 700,000 startup. Then you have the electriciy costs for the EMs, not trivial.
At this rate, the genius atomic memory becomes cost effective (it never becomes time-effective or space-effective) in about 50,000 years.
So yeah, I am an idiot, someone give me 700,000 an free electricity so I can take advantage of this bits/hour tech!!!!
As for the TROLL rating
I was refering to the posts not the ratings.
Yet another great numerical product from the "out our asses for extortion and profit" corporation, LLC.
Call the copyRight police! I just found my latest script embeded in that atomic pattern (photo) - it's backwards & encrypted, but I'm sure it's mine! ...............
- just beacuse you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that the world is NOT out to get ya! -
this is totally ridicilous
what if I found three hundred flying goats, I wouldn't tell anyone. They'd think I'm fucked up or something.
Revealing the secret about my love to giraffes might plant a retarded status in my aura.
Got my point?
Yes, which dumbfuck would go out with this, unless he or she wants publicity, with the possibility to be laughed at as well.