Nanomagnetic vortices could lead to bigger hard drives, faster RAM

You know, we were sitting in our editors' meeting the other day, and we all came to a very serious consensus about our reportage these days. There's been a serious dearth of vortices in our articles, and so we're going to do our darndest to bring you more coverage of these truly awesome swirling clouds. Fortunately for us, those egghead physicists down at Rice University know how to read our minds. A team over in Houston used a scanning ion microscope to create and measure "ultra-thin circular disks of soft magnetic cobalt" ranging in diameter from one micron to 38 microns. According to a press release issued by the university, the six micron wide (about the size of a red blood cell) magnetic vortex is "a cone-like structure that's created in the magnetic field at the disk when all the magnetic moments of the atoms in the disk align into uniform concentric circles." (Whatever that means.) Lead researcher Carl Rau, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, said that this new advance may lead to storage densities "in the range of terabits per square inch," and went on to say that "magnetic processors" and "high-speed magnetic RAM" may also be in the works. Now that we think about it, this is probably what would happen to the offspring of Storm and Magneto too.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 7:06PM]

I have that exact same picture!

Bigger HDDs are a plus too.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 6:34PM]

Get vorticular!

[Brian from Texas Posted Sep 8th 2006 4:52PM]

I just started an Intro to Engineering class and think this is right in line with a good 'ol class discussion. It seems that the world's resources are finite and that with the ever exscalating population growth we will exhaust these resources rather quickly.

Renewable energy
Cyclical development
Less waste

.... oh, I'm not very smart. These things seem way out there. Anybody have an idea for my class project?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 5:04PM]

how about reverse engineering something?
you don't by any chance go to vrhs do you?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 5:16PM]

I want that photo! Any one where to get it?!

[Taylor Yes Taylor Posted Sep 8th 2006 5:33PM]

They "seem" to read your minds....?
Maybe they've developed more technology than they're leading us to believe.....
:)
-Taylor

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 5:33PM]

You can find an 800 x 600 of that photo here :

http://www.cbox.cz/tomas_psika/tornada.htm

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 9th 2006 6:42PM]

first we have exploding batteries, now we want thunder and lightning storms ravaging in our hard drive?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 9th 2006 1:12PM]

The world is all math and magnets.
Finally we harness the power of magnets... The same item we were told to keep our floppy disks and monitors away from.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 9th 2006 7:16AM]

Thanks!!! not high res enough for my liking though :(

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 5:53PM]

Oh gosh....

not you, too.

I ABSOLUTELY HATE THAT STUPID PICTURE!

my brother loves it, so it's always our background, and it is so annoying now....

oh well....

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 7:49PM]

Wouldn't this technology lead to smaller hard drives, not bigger ones?

http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/DiskPlatter-1301.htm

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 8th 2006 8:21PM]

are you really that retarted? We're talking capacity, not physical size.

sorry if I'm sour today. I lost something very important to me.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 9th 2006 2:09PM]

micron = micrometer
micrometer > nanometer
therefore, not "nanomagnetic"

what will we call actual nanotechnology when it finally comes to market, picotechnology?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 9th 2006 8:05PM]

Wont matter if we have larger harddrives, the next Windows will need at least 10 gigs anyways.. Good ole DOS 5.1, a nice little 7 megs, sigh..

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 10th 2006 12:33PM]

How many years away is this?