If you’ve ever thought that your MP3 player just doesn’t hold enough music and the 40,000 tracks the largest MP3 player can store is nowhere near enough for your diverse tastes, fear not, for some boffins from Scotland have made a technological breakthrough.

Well, almost.

It’s still not proven, but the theory is that a new switch that allows them to manipulate the electrical field can be installed in the MP3 player, which means they can store more data without increasing the size of the device itself.

As well as being revolutionary news for the MP3 player market, this could also mean incredible leaps for technology such as DVD. Don’t get too excited yet though, because the technology isn’t expected to come out for another 15 years.
At the current rate of progress however, you can expect that rather Conservative estimate to come down quite a bit.

Professor Cronin said:

What we have done is find a way to potentially increase the data storage capabilities in a radical way. This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule-based switch that can be easily manipulated using an electric field.

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.