The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley researchers have developed an ultra-dense memory chip, capable of storing data for billion of years (besting silicon chips by roughly... a billion years). Consisting of a crystalline iron Nanoparticle shuttle covered within a multiwalled carbon Nanotube, the device can be write and read from using conventional voltages already available with digital electronics from today.
The research was lead by Alex Zettl, who observe that current digital storage methods are capable of storing mass amount of data. The new method, is based on the iron Nanoparticle which can move back and forth within the hollow Nanotu known as shuttle memory.Alex Zettl believes that, shuttle memory is years away from practical application, it could have a lot of archival applications in the future.