The race to the bottom [consumer nanodevice]

This paper discusses how Gerd Binning, a Nobel laureate in physics and a star in IBM Corp.'s metamorphosing research apparatus, and Tom Rust, a self-taught engineer who founded Nanochip Inc., are competing to develop nanotechnology's first truly big commercial breakthrough, called probe storage. Probe storage is a memory system that could keep data storage on a par with the pitiless pace of advances in consumer and computing electronics. They are prime candidates to combine the low cost, high capacity and random access features of ordinary magnetic hard disk drives with the low power draw, high data rate, small size, and nonvolatility of solid-state flash memories.