Apple just got done unveiling its new iBooks 2 platform, letting us in on its plan to revamp education (in part) through its fancy new e-textbooks. These digital volumes look beautiful and come at a relatively meager monetary cost (.99), but a quick perusal of the textbooks available in iTunes reveals they’ll take a sizable chunk of your iPad’s memory. The current lineup of eight texts range in size from 800MB to 2.77GB, so folks looking to grab a full semester’s worth of materials may have to carry an extra iPad or three to get the job done. Not an ideal solution, but a few Apple slates are still easier to schlep across campus than those massive texts you’re used to, right?

Apple’s iBooks 2 e-textbooks pack tons of info, take up tons of your iPad’s memory originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IBM’s Almaden Research Center is filled with some of the best and brightest minds in the world, and its researchers just released new findings that detail how just how far IBM has come in the realm of magnetic storage. Andreas Heinrich is leading the team at Big Blue that figured out how to create atomic storage based on the fact that atoms of ferromagnetic material align their spins in one direction — so the ability to control the spin direction is what’s needed to make such minature memory possible. Heinrich and his crew were able to accomplish the trick by supercooling 12 atoms to four degrees kelvin (-452 fahrenheit), and arranging them using an electron microscope in such a away that nonvolatile storage became possible. As this is only a proof of concept, we won’t be seeing atomic memory at, say, CES any time soon, but you can dig into the deep science behind the breakthrough at the source link below.

IBM stores bits on arrays of atoms, shrinks magnetic storage to the scientific limit originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IBM's new memory storing the letters for the word THINK.

Computer and memory chips usually tend to get smaller over time, but in a paper published Thursday in Science IBM details how it’s building memory chips that would be 100 times more dense than today’s hard drives by starting with the smallest building blocks–atoms. Big Blue’s prototype chip is only 12 atoms across (click here for an awesome visualization of how small an atom is. No really, click it!) but is another way of thinking about ways to get beyond the limits of building ever smaller chips keeping Moore’s Law on track.

Andreas Heinrich, the project lead for IBMs efforts, explained in an interview that this tech may never be realized in part because it requires an entirely new type of manufacturing equipment to be built. However, IBM is learning how to manipulate atoms for storing bits and identified a new type of magnetism that could one day be used. Unlike the type of magnetism that keeps your magnets stuck to your fridge, IBM is looking at the reverse of those properties to make this highly dense type of memory.

It’s called antiferromagnetism, and the benefits of using it are not only its density, but that data wouldn’t be lost if it encountered a magnet. IBM is also playing with memory made using traditional magnets, but unfortunately at the atomic level nearby magnets tend to disrupt one another making it difficult to use them close together to store data. Applying antiferromagnetism prevents this and enables researchers to build smaller structures. Heinrich notes that the 12-atom memory chip prototype was only possible in a very low temperature environment, and to make a stable prototype in a room-temperature environment it would take a device that’s 150-atoms thick.

So clearly these aren’t ready for prime time in a hot data center anytime soon. I kid, but the real value of the research here is that there are folks out there continuing to try to advance computing not just for tomorrow but for decades down the line. When your future mobile phone packs a terabyte of storage it may be Heinrich and IBM you should thank. For more info check out IBM’s video below.

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