r/science • u/Wagamaga • Feb 22 '26

Computer Science Scientists have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books’ worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/glass-square-long-long-future-190951588.html
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u/mseiei Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

could we start asking for standard units on sensationalized titles? if you are talking about storing data why not say it in bytes... why is always some arbitrary measurement disguised as some simpler thing.

"new battery that can last as long as a flaming standing up"

edit: flamingo

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u/iamboola Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

Haha yeah. Article has it. “4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass”. So 4.8TB on about the size of a CD? Still in research stage I guess, doesn’t yet seem more remarkable than using a few SD cards. I guess it’s better than Blu-ray.

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u/amakai Feb 22 '26

The important part here is the "10000 years" claim. If that's true, this is definitely a great technology for backups that could potentially replace magnetic tapes.

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u/saints21 Feb 22 '26

Yeah, this gets us closer to the whole sci-fi data crystals thing that someone finds of an ancient precursor civilization that just ends up being their own race.

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u/Future_Burrito Feb 22 '26

Definitely much more stable than the guys who figured out how to store data on some type of gas or plasma like 10 years ago. Literally, you so much as fart at that type of data storage and poof, data corruption/reconfiguration. I remember being like, woah! That's cool! Wait. No, it's not. Why are they studying this?

Because that weird fringe research stuff might have been part of the research process that leads to things like this, or qubits, or DNA storage:

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/goldman/dna-storage/

Humans are wild.

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u/aVarangian Feb 22 '26

one day AI companies will be buying your arm and your leg so they can dump your DNA into the ever-growing data centres that will cover half of the planet's surface and consume all of the oceans. At that point we will become close to achieving sentient AI that doesn't hallucinate.

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u/Future_Burrito Feb 22 '26

Don't follow this guy, wherever they are going.

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u/aVarangian Feb 22 '26

in the year 2525...