New Scientist Tech - Breaking News - Nanowires and water are a memorable mix: "Adding water to nanowires could create computer memory devices capable of storing 10 million times more information in the same physical space as existing drives.

Researchers at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, both in Philadelphia, and Harvard University in Massachusetts, US, discovered that water turns barium titanate (BaTiO3) nanowires into a potential form of computer memory.

Barium titanate is a ferroelectric material. It maintains an electric polarisation analogous to magnetisation - a positive charge on one end and a negative charge at the other - that can be oriented by an electric field. This makes ferroelectric materials suitable for storing data, in the form of electric polarisation, on the microscale."