IBM fit an entire bit of data on a magnet made with a single atom

A team of IBM researchers just created the world's smallest magnet using a solitary atom — and if that wasn't enough of a challenge, they packed it with one bit of digital data for good measure.

The breakthrough, which was recently described in the journal Nature, could lead to exciting data storage systems in the future. Current tech depends on hard disk drives that use up to 100,000 atoms to store one bit of data, according to IBM. 

Future applications of this discovery could allow people to store 1,000 times more information in the same amount of space. For a more practical illustration of the scale, IBM says a system using the tiny magnets could potentially hold the entire iTunes music library —  that's 35 million songs — on a drive the size of a credit card. How's that for compression?   Read more...