Recent advances in information storage using magnetic recording have been a key to producing today's faster and smaller computers ("The Big, Bad Bit Stuffers of IBM," TR July/August 1998). But squeezing more and more data onto magnetic materials is getting tougher, threatening to slow progress to a crawl. To tackle the problem, scientists at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory have built a micromechanical device, called Millipede, that uses a thousand tiny tips to rapidly "feel" data bits on a nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) scale.

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