The Bottomless DVD

A new breakthrough could herald the 10-terabyte disc.

wHAT’s IN sTOrE The five-dimensional storage system developed by an Australian research team takes traditional 2D storage and adds multiple layers, color coding, and polarization of the light. The storage medium is a network of gold nanorods.

Imagine storing 10,000 standard-definition movies on one disc. Sound impossible? Not to a team of Australian researchers. The team recently published a report in the journal Nature in which it details its devel- opment of a “five-dimensional” storage medium that promises to store up 10 tera- bytes on a single disc.

Peter Zijlstra, James W.M. Chon, and Min Gu of the Swinburne University of Tech- nology found a way to combine address- ing data using wavelength, polarization, and three spatial dimensions, creating the so-called five dimensions of addressable space. The approach allows for a storage density of a terabit of information in just a cubic centimeter of space.

Mixing and matching different methods of addressing data has been tried using individual methods, the researchers said. In fact, writing data to a three-dimensional

storage medium has been one of the hall- marks of holographic storage. But for five- dimensional storage, the team projected information into the material using differ- ent color wavelengths. Additional informa- tion was then added by polarizing the light, first at a fixed orientation and then by rotat- ing the filter 90 degrees. Data was read using a technique called “longitudinal SPR- mediated 2-photon luminescence.”

It’s difficult to say, however, how easily a solution like this might be moved into pro- duction, since the medium used to store the information is a network of gold nanorods.

“The major hurdle is the lack of a suit- able recording medium that is extremely selective in the domains of wavelength and polarization,” the researchers wrote in an abstract. Nonetheless, companies such as Samsung have already expressed interest.

—Mark Hachman

As seen on PC Magazine from July 2009 great article about the future of robotics/robotic

The Future of Robots Will Be Underwhelming

The  future  of  robotics  will be  much  duller  than  we expected. Our dream of sen- tient automatons helping and nurturing us, entertaining our children, and brightening our lives grows more distant by the day. Don’t get me wrong, the mid-21st century will be filled with robots, but they’ll just be, for the most part, nameless, faceless, and coldly efficient. It’s a crying shame.

Kids Love Pleo, Business World Doesn’t I couldn’t help having thoughts along those lines recently as I surveyed the faces of the youngsters assembled in a semicircle around me. I was a guest speaker at my daughter’s school, where I gave a talk about robots to an audience of 10- and 11-year- olds. Accompanying me was a bag full of robots. As I talked, the kids passed around a Ugobe Pleo robotic camosaur. Each student had 30 seconds with the playful dinosaur, and I could tell that they all wanted more. I’d also brought with me Hasbro’s program-

mable and voice-responsive R2-D2, as well as WowWee’s Femisapien and Tri-bot, and a tiny bug bot. Although the students were doing their best to pay attention to what I was saying, they could not take their eyes off the robots.

I  told  them  how  Pleo  was  the  most advanced robot of all those assembled before them and that it was also part of a dying breed. Ugobe has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and it is unlikely that anyone will buy the rights to Pleo. It’s just one of a long line of impressive consumer entertainment robots that have disappeared from the land- scape in the past decade. Sony euthanized its remarkable AIBO robotic dog in 2006, and Hasbro years ago abandoned the R2 bot I brought with me.

Most robotics enthusiasts know why the AIBO was so amazing and what was great and not so great about the Pleo. Each battery-operated robot was autonomous and responsive. Both could change over time, depending on user interaction. They could develop “personalities” and mimic