One of the primary goals of technology development has long been to make technology as small as possible, while simultaneously improving its performance. The result of these efforts is the field of nanotechnology, which is now applied in a variety of uses.

As far as leaps in computing go, this one’s pretty tiny: a research team from IBM has managed to store data on a single atom. Despite the microscopic size of the result, the impact is potentially huge when one considers the effects this discovery could have on computing.