Video Game Music Stored in Atomic-Scale Rewritable Memory

Research led by Professor Robert Wolkow's lab at the University of Alberta in Canada could potentially increase the capacity of current hard drives 1,000 times. The researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to remove and replace single atoms of hydrogen on a silicon chip. These techniques allow them to store binary information, used in computers, with just one atom representing each bit of information. The stored information can be changed by adding or removing atoms to write new information. The researchers built a 192-bit memory, where they stored a simplified version of the first 24 notes from Nintendo's Mario video game by moving just 62 atoms. The research was published in July, 2018 in Nature Communications .