The bootless PC and terabytes on a dime: "Imagine a PC with instantaneous boot up or storing 10TB of data -- 10,000 gigabytes -- on a device the size of a dime with data-transfer rates unhampered by any latency.

Those are just two examples of the promises that storage nanotechnologies hold: combining the functions of memory chips and disk drives on a single piece of hardware that is a fraction of the size of devices today.

Nanotechnology, the science of engineering functional systems at the molecular scale, holds the possibility of billions of infinitesimally small machines working together to build products from the ground up using readily available materials."