No, that’s not the clear plastic disc that goes on top of a spindle of DVD-Rs. What you see there is a very special piece of glass with some crazy nano structuring, effectively turning it into a whole new generation of computer memory.

The millimetre-sized device changes the way light travels through glass, generating ‘whirlpools’ of light that can be read in much the same way as data in optical fibres, except the “whirlpools” of light data can be even more precise and allow for the “optical manipulation of atom-sized objects.” Even more technically, these are called, “monolithic glass space-variant polarization converters” and they’re handled on the nano scale.

In effect, this creation by researchers at the University of Southampton uses a new five dimensional approach that is reusable and twenty times cheaper and more compact than older methods of microsocopy. Most of this is Greek to me too, but if it means we can cram more memory into millimeter-sized nanostructures, I’m all for it.

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Researchers in Germany have found that the brain discards information one bit per active neuron per second. It looks like the old adage “in one ear and out the other” has some solid science behind it.

The brain codes information in the form of electrical pulses, or spikes. Each one of the brain’s 100 billion neurons act as receivers and transmitters. When a spike enters a neuron, an electrical discharge, or action potential, forms on the neuron’s cell membrane. The neuron will give an electrical input to its neighbour only if the potential exceeds a certain value. Therefore, an activity pattern is quickly lost or “forgotten” through tiny changes. This means the signal transmission in the brain is extremely chaotic, as much depends on the performance on individual neurons.

The findings indicate that the brain’s main switching centre, the cerebral cortex, is specifically tailored to process brief snapshots of the outside world. Whether those brief snapshots get retained is a completely different story altogether… what were we talking about again?

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I’m not knocking Silicon Power, where else can memory storage technology go? Props to them for this card, it’s pretty fast to at 400X (90 MB/s). No price or availability announced yet.

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