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What is the smallest thing you can think of?  an electron, a quark? Well now what is the smallest thing you can make?  The answer is complicated but one thing you can say is that the smallest piece of a hard drive is about 10 nanometers.  That is 10-one billionth of a meter.  If you take your average hair and slice it along its width 10,000 times you get 10 nanometers.  How about the other way of thinking about it….you need only 50 atoms to make something that is 10 nanometers.  Engineers at HGST, a part of Western Digital (you might even have one of their hard drives in your computer) have made 10 nanometer magnetic islands which can be used for data storage.  Why is this important? It means you can pack much more data in the same size drive.  To make these 10 nanometer magnetic islands, the HGST engineers used ‘self-assembling’ molecules and nanoimprinting techniques.
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