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Who knew pencils could spell ‘Hello Hollywood’?

Think about a handheld device that can hold every movie you’ll ever want to see, and you’ll get a taste of what Rice University Professor James Tour’s new type of solid-state storage could achieve. It all started with the same material you spread on paper every time you use a pencil: graphite. Tour and his research team discovered that a strip of graphite only 10 atoms thick could be broken and repaired repeatedly with jolts of electric current. That’s called a switch, and it could start a revolution in data storage that helps achieve Tour’s quest to bring molecular memory technology to everyday devices. He’s already working on manufacturing techniques, so it might not be long before you can hold a whole theater’s worth of entertainment in the palm of your hand. That’s the ticket!