Apple advertises the 160GB iPod classic as holding 40,000 songs, an absurd concept not so long ago, but some new science may make that as quaint as a 1MB hard drive seems today. Two researchers at Glasgow University have announced a molecule-sized switch that they say could allow up to 500,000GB to be housed on one square inch of substrate. Think: A few million songs in your pocket.

The research has potential for all manner of computing applications, of course, and not just digital media devices that already dwarf most music or movie libraries; but, the idea of walking around with more than 1000 times the storage of most desktop computers in our pockets is an intriguing one.

Enough of the fun stuff, though, let’s get to the wonky, gearhead, nitty gritty: "We have been able to assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32nm apart so they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device," Professor Lee Cronin told New Electronics, which first reported the story.

"This is unprecedented," he added, "and provides a route to produce new a molecule based switch that can be manipulated using an electric field. By taking these nanoscale clusters, just a nanometer in size, and placing them onto a gold or carbon, we can control the switching ability."

That last bit is important, according to the two professors who announced the research, because it could, "potentially bridge the gap between traditional semiconductor devices and components for nanoscale plastic electronics."

That’s one of the holy grails in this branch of research, and if this technology can be brought to market, it will mean exponential leaps in the computing world.

Those exponential leaps won’t be happening soon, however. The Telegraph reported that there are still fabrication problems to be overcome.