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So you've got 40,000 songs on your iPod, yet you still can't find anything to listen to. Well, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough at the University of Glasgow, your mp3 player could soon have a storage capacity 150,000 times greater than today's top-shelf devices.

Glasgow researchers have reportedly developed a molecule-sized switch which dramatically boosts storage capacity without the need to increase the physical size of players. The technology could see half a million gigabytes of data crammed into a square inch microchip, allowing users to literally store hundreds of millions of video clips and music tracks on a single device.

The breakthrough is likely to also transform storage on other consumer electronics, including DVD players.

"We have found a way to potentially increase the data storage capabilities in a radical way," said Professor Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow. "This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule-based switch that can be easily manipulated using an electric field. The key advantage of the molecule sized switch is information / transistor density in traditional semi-conductors. Molecule sized switches would lead to increasing data storage to say 4 Petabits per square inch. This breakthrough shows conceptually that this is possible (showing the bulk effect) but we are yet to solve the fabrication and addressing problems."

However, there's a great deal of promise for the switches, and finding fabrication solutions shouldn't be much trouble. "The fact these switches work on carbon means that they could be embedded in plastic chips so silicon is not needed and the system becomes much more flexible both physically and technologically,” Cronin said. In other words, that super expensive high-end iPod you just bought is going to be as outdated as the betamax in a very short time.
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