Boy - the world's smallest film star
Boy - the world's smallest film star
You might say he is just a collection of atoms, but then, really, aren't we all? The Local's German of the Week is Boy, from the world's smallest stop-motion film, made with individual atoms moved by a German-led research team.
The video A Boy and His Atom is being watched around the world, making Boy and his German father Andreas Heinrich famous way beyond the confines of science.
Heinrich is principle investigator at IBM - a research rather than detective position. He leads the scanning probe microscopy project looking for possible data storage use of nanostructures. This resulted in the creation of the world's smallest magnetic bits, made of just 12 magnetic atoms.
This answered the question of how many atoms it takes to reliably store one bit of magnetic information. Currently it takes about a million atoms to store a bit of data on a modern computer or electronic device. If commercialized, this atomic memory could one day store all of the movies ever made in a device the size of a fingernail.
And although when published in January 2012 in the journal Science, this excited those in the physics and computing world, it is only now that the work is receiving wider exposure - thanks to Boy.
http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20130502-49489.html#.UYMEFUr4KSo
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