Physicists at the University of Wisconsin have created a way to manipulate individual silicon atoms in a lattice to express binary digits. 1 silicon atom is surrounded in a cell of 20 atoms the keep the target one from interacting with others. It is the presence or absense of this central atom that is read/written by a scanning tunneling microscope as a bit. This is compared to other means of storage: 20 atoms for a bit in this system, and 32 atoms (64 for 2bp+backbone). The replication rate for DNA at room temperature is 600bp/s, but silicon could theoretically be read at 10^7 bits/s. Density compared to conventional disks is also talked about. The highest density ever achieved in conventional hard disks is 100Gbits/in^2, while silicon would permit 250Tbits/in^2, which fulfills Feynman's prediction all the information in all the books could be contained on a cube 2/100ths of an inch in size.

 

Here's UW's press release and here's the paper

it is becoming more aparent that scientists are begining to understand how the brain works after all.......even if they don't realize it......all they have to be able to do now....is figure out a way to apply binary code to subatomic particals and with element and binary cobinations they can store lifetimes of information in a tomato.....or even a metalic bar...but that is too far in the future I think....

Almost there. We can already store (this article) and process (quantum computing, we're up to 7qubits now) information using single atoms. With the approach in this article, a memory chip the size of a tomato could store all the books ever written.

Yep....it would definitly be cool......the trick will come when they try to move away from organic storage and use sub atomic storage in stuff like metal alloys and such.....