The Newton Project, a UK organization that's putting the complete works of Isaac Newton online, is featuring an amazing list of 48 "sins" that 19-year-old Isaac committed in 1662, according to a list he wrote. The young genius was both very pious and very peevish, having punched his sister, poked Iohn Keys with a pin, and even threatened to burn down his stepfather's house.

And all this before Whitsunday!

Here is the complete, and completely scandalous, list:

1. Vsing the word (God) openly
2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it.
5. Making a mousetrap on Thy day
6. Contriving of the chimes on Thy day
7. Squirting water on Thy day
8. Making pies on Sunday night
9. Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day
10. Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
11. Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons11
12. Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.
13. Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
19. Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it
20. Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee
21. A relapse
22. A relapse
23. A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper.
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar
26. Calling Dorothy Rose a jade
27. Glutiny in my sickness.
28. Peevishness with my mother.
29. With my sister.
30. Falling out with the servants
31. Divers commissions of alle my duties
32. Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times
33. Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections
34. Not living according to my belief
35. Not loving Thee for Thy self.
36. Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us
37. Not desiring Thy ordinances
38. Not long {longing} for Thee in {illeg}
39. Fearing man above Thee
40. Vsing unlawful means to bring us out of distresses
41. Caring for worldly things more than God
42. Not craving a blessing from God on our honest endeavors.
43. Missing chapel.
44. Beating Arthur Storer.
45. Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter.
46. Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne.
47. Twisting a cord on Sunday morning
48. Reading the history of the Christian champions on Sunday

A kimnel is a large wooden tub for brewing, kneading, and salting meat, according to Merriam-Webster.

[The Newton Project via Brain Pickings]

in the beginning of the beginning, the exploding hot universe was full of elementary particles, but the particles had no mass. The universe also contained force fields, and one of those fields, the Higgs, cooled and condensed into a quantum liquid. The liquid dragged on the other particles, giving them mass. The liquid rippled, and the ripples formed a new particle, called the Higgs.

It reads like a just-so story. But it's the basis of the Standard Model of physics. And so far, physicists have found every particle the Standard Model has predicted but one: the Higgs itself. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have been looking for the Higgs for more than a year, and by next winter they will either have found it or they'll know they won't. "It's not obvious," says Andrei Gritsan, a Johns Hopkins University physicist working at the LHC, "which scenario would be more interesting."

Physicists at the LHC look for Higgs particles by smashing other particles into each other so hard that something like a Higgs will appear out of the energy of the collision, leaving its signature in a detector. Previous experiments have suggested that the Higgs does not "live" at energies between 0 and 114 gigaelectron-volts, and physicists have now determined that 145 GeV is the uppermost limit, so they are running out of places to look.

As they collide more and more particles, and detect more and more promising signatures, physicists will become increasingly sure that they've detected a Higgs. By this summer, they will be 95 percent confident, but for physicists that's not good enough. By the end of this year, they will be dead certain one way or the other.

If they do find the Higgs, they will have found something profoundly weird. The Standard Model puts all particles into two camps, those that stick together into matter and those that carry the four forces (electromagnetism, gravity, and the "strong" and "weak" nuclear forces). The Higgs belongs to neither camp, and pushing physicists to define it further gets you nowhere. "Words don't matter here," says Jonathan Bagger, a physicist at Johns Hopkins. "Only math does."

If they don't find it? Maybe it's there but its signature is different. Or maybe the Standard Model has a fatal flaw. And if that's the case, nobody has even a just-so story to account for mass. "It's very exciting," Bagger says. "It's very scary."

2012: THE YEAR IN SCIENCE

• Garage Rocketeers Approach Orbit
• Games Go Outside the Box
• China Steps Up
• Congress Keeps Fiddling
• A Dozen More Stories to Expect in 2012

If cleaning carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was easy, we'd already be doing it. But carbon capture has proven to be a tough technology to feasibly roll out on a grand scale, and that means all the things we do that produce carbon dioxide emissions--which seems to be just about everything these days--are still roughly as bad for the planet as they were several years ago. That's a problem in a warming world, and one that a team of researchers may have just found a solution for via an inexpensive polymeric material.

Reporting their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the team (which includes a Nobel laureate in chemistry) descirbes a new solid material based on polyethylenimine that can be used to capture carbon dioxide at the source--be that an industrial smokestack or a car's exhaust pipe--under real-world conditions where the air contains moisture.

That last part is important. Previous methods of scrubbing CO₂ from the air have enjoyed varying degrees of success (usually under controlled conditions), but none has been particularly effective in the presence of humidity. The new material, which is inexpensive and readily available, has shown some of the highest carbon dioxide removal rates of any material ever tested in the presence of humidity.

It's also reusable. After capturing carbon, the material also gives it up easily so it can be sequestered or recycled through the manufacture of other substances. The polyethylenimine material can then also be reused over and over again to capture more carbon dioxide. Used to line smokestacks or even out in the open atmosphere, the material could blunt the impact of all of those things we humans do that are contributing to the carbon glut in the atmosphere.

[Science Daily]

A new material based on blue cheese fungus can attack and eat bacteria that comes in contact with it, protecting foods from spoiling. The material was designed to mimic the way rinds protect soft cheeses like Camembert and Brie, but it could conceivably be used as a self-cleaning coating for other surfaces - so long as you don't mind a little fungus.

Researchers at ETH Zurich wanted to build biologically based smart materials, which can be adapted to a wide variety of uses. They drew inspiration from cheese rinds, which (along with tangy flavor) protect cheese from invading microorganisms. Researchers led by Lukas C. Gerber started with a thin plastic sheet that they covered in a mixture of Penicillium roqueforti fungus, which is used to make blue cheese. The fungus was sandwiched between a second, porous plastic sheet. Nanoscale pores enabled gas and liquids to pass through to the inside, but kept the fungus in check.

Then the team poured a sugar mixture on top and watched the fungus get to work. After two weeks, all the sugar had been consumed, leaving nothing but a clean surface, according to the researchers' paper. The fungus went dormant after its own food supply ran out, and the team was able to reconstitute it by adding sugar. As long as it has some moisture, the fungus will survive between the plastic sheets, the paper says.

This could conceivably be adapted to work with fungus that would attack bacteria, creating self-disinfecting food packaging or even kitchen surfaces. Or the idea could be scaled up to very different uses, like wrapping buildings in the nanoporous sheets and inserting algae between them, which would be used to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen.

"Such composites of classical industrial ingredients and living microorganisms can provide a novel form of functional or smart materials with capability for evolutionary adaptation," the Swiss researchers write.

The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[PhysOrg]

"Ultrabook" is a word you've probably already heard used to describe a thin, powerful laptop. You've probably also seen a MacBook Air-the genre's archetype. But if you haven't heard the term this year, get ready for some major exposure: ultrabooks are the way PC laptops will be marketed to us in 2012. But are they something new? Or simply a laptop, refined?

Intel will tell you the former-that Ultrabooks represent a revolutionary "new era" in computing. Intel's role is to provide the ultra-thin guts to PC manufacturers like Toshiba, Acer and Asus, who bundle the hardware into their own unique takes on the ultrabook form.

At their CES press conference this morning, Intel outlined all the new features these guts will have in 2012. And they're impressive, inside and out.

On the outside, Intel's pared-down logic boards will ensure that 2012's PC ultrabooks can all be under 18mm thin. And with more powerful batteries on board, these new laptops will be able to power larger screens, addressing a frequent complaint, and a valid one, since the LCD is the single biggest power hog in a computer. Intel says half of the ultrabooks in the 2012 pipeline will have screens 14" or larger.

Good things continue on the inside. Intel's Sandy Bridge integrated graphics (which will be replaced by the next-generation Ivy Bridge later this year) can power DirextX 11 graphics without breaking too much of a sweat (and, hopefully, without killing your battery). Built-in near-field communication brings the possibility of instantaneous info transfers from NFC-equipped objects for quickly entering credit card info, sharing links and photos, and more. When paired with Intel's hardware-based identity protection system, which verifies your info is coming from your computer, it's a convenient and secure package. Intel's also partnering with the voice-recognition company Nuance to provide the computing muscle necessary for advanced Siri-like speech controls, but without having to connect with the cloud.

Intel's also interested in playing with user interfaces. Personally I'm skeptical of their claim this morning that touching our laptops' screens will ever be a viable method of interacting with them (and according to Twitter, many of you agree with me). Right now, I can only see this being usable on hybrid tablet-laptop devices like Asus's Transformer Prime, especially when paired (one day) with Windows 8's touch-focused interface elements.

How the manufactures implent these features is up to them, but they'll being doing it with a huge Intel marketing push at their back. It's no wonder they allotted half of their CES press conference this morning to their senior VP of marketing. He showed us a commercial that likens the ultrabook to man's ancient discovery of agricultural tools and the Gutenberg printing press-no joke. This is some serious marketing about to be unleashed.

The elephant in the room for Intel and the PC makers, of course, is that the MacBook Air has been on sale since January 2008. The current generation, the first to fully and with no compromises in power replace a larger laptop for everyday use, has been on the market since late 2010. There's a lot of catching up to do, hence the major marketing. In the end, we'll be dealing with tons more sleeker, lighter and faster Windows laptops on the market. A good thing? Definitely. Akin to man's discovery of the iron plow? Probably not.

Follow along with all of our CES 2012 coverage here.

Days before Phobos-Grunt reenters the atmosphere, a new video captures the failed Mars probe traveling backward above the Earth. Its solar panels face away from the sun and there's no sign of it tumbling, which most spacecraft are designed to do to maintain stability.

Paris-based amateur astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured the video below from the French Riviera on New Year's Day. The Russian satellite is seen moving left to right, toward the direction of the sun. Legault - who is known for his stunning images of the space shuttle and ISS framed by the sun, among other astrophotographic achievements - traveled to the Calern Observatory above Nice, France, to set up his instruments for Phobos-Grunt's flyby.

He used a 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a focal length of 7000 millimeters and an automatic tracking system, which he describes in more detail on his website. Without the tracking system, the satellite - which is five times smaller than the space shuttle - would cross your screen in about one-thirtieth of a second. The video contains 963 images captured at 12 frames per second.

You can make out the bulbous fuel tanks to the right, and the solar panels to the left.

Phobos-Grunt is expected to plunge back to Earth sometime very soon, falling between 51 degrees north and 51 degrees south latitude.

[Thierry Legault via BBC]

Most of the wireless carriers have scaled back on coverage at CES, but AT&T is still here, loud and proud, announcing a host of phones for the upcoming year. It's a sort of similar situation to last year with Verizon; AT&T is finally rolling out their LTE network, and they're using CES to announce the first round of phones. And a lot of them look great! Here's what you'll see trickling into AT&T stores this year.

HTC TITAN II

AT&T has long been the best place to find Windows Phones (and, might we remind you, Windows Phones are really great), so it's no surprise that they'll be offering the jumbo-sized HTC Titan II (pictured top). It'll be the very first LTE Windows Phone, a minor upgrade of the starting center of the Windows Phone lineup. It plays center because it's huge; it has a 4.7-inch screen, and the new version will also have a 16-megapixel camera, which is pretty crazy. More megapixels doesn't equal more better photos, but it's still an impressive spec.

No details yet about price or release date.

SAMSUNG GALAXY S II SKYROCKET HD

In future correspondence, we will only refer to the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD by its full and complete name, because something so Dickensian and poetic deserves to be reproduced accurately. The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD is basically a Samsung-ified version of the best Android phone on the market, the Galaxy Nexus. Samsung made the Nexus, too, but due to Google's rules for the Nexus line, wasn't allowed to spurt its custom skin all over the phone. The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD changes that, and it looks like it'll come with Gingerbread rather than the newer, better Ice Cream Sandwich, too--it has the older Android buttons. That hasn't been confirmed, though.

Again, no details yet about price or release date.

SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE

We wrote about the Galaxy Note back in the fall, and now we're getting a little bit more info. To jog your memory, the Note is a phone so big, we're mildly uncomfortable even calling it a phone. It has a 5.3-inch screen, which will certainly make it too big for many pockets, and comes with a stylus for, you know, taking notes, which feels distinctly tablet-y. Now we know that it'll be coming to AT&T "soon," running Gingerbread (argh Samsung why? Ice Cream Sandwich is just sitting there!) and for an undisclosed price. We do know it'll run on AT&T's LTE network, though.

SONY XPERIA ION

Sony's first LTE phone. We like Sony's Android offerings okay; the Xperia Arc announced at last year's show was one of the better phones that year, and they have my personal favorite custom Android skin, a nicely audio/video-focused attempt. This new one sees a bump in screen resolution to a full 720p, with better cameras and a dual-core processor. According to Gizmodo, it'll come out in the second quarter of the year, for an unknown price.

SONY PLAYSTATION VITA

And we move from phones to portable gaming consoles. The Vita, which has yet to be released here in North America, is the newest portable PlayStation console from Sony. It has a 5-inch touchscreen and, most oddly, a touch-sensitive back, which can be used as extra controls while gaming. It's a smart idea to bring it to mobile; smartphone gaming has an advantage in that online multiplayer games can be played anywhere, and the AT&T Vita evens that score. Curiously, it'll only be available with 3G at launch, though according to Engadget, an executive hinted that it would be "getting" LTE. Not clear what that means--could mean a future LTE version, or some sort of upgrade.

It'll be available on February 2nd for $300, with a two-tiered data plan similar to the iPad's (month-to-month, no contract, $15 for 250MB per month or $25 for 2GB per month).

PANTECH ELEMENT

Is a waterproof Android tablet. It has LTE and a dual-core processor, and is priced cheaply at $250 (with a 2-year contract, frustratingly), but it's mostly notable for being immune to liquid-related accidents.

Follow along with all of our CES 2012 coverage here.

DNA extracted from canned human brains could help researchers studying mental health disorders, if scientists can figure out how to mine it. Preserved brains taken from autopsied patients - some dating to the 1890s - could serve as a new archive of old data related to mental health.

The Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis owns a collection of preserved brains and brain chunks that were taken from mentally ill patients during autopsies. An Indiana University pathologist has been trying to extract DNA from them to search for genes related to schizophrenia and other disorders, a Scientific American story says.

Certain gene variants are thought to be related to schizophrenia, but scientists haven't isolated a single mutation or series of mutations that can be directly linked to the disease (or other mental health disorders, for that matter). So studying preserved brain specimens could add to the body of evidence. But a mentally ill person's brain is difficult to come by - autopsies are on the decline, for one thing, and institutions that do maintain brain donation banks tend to guard them carefully, SciAm says. Enter the jellied brains.

As an added benefit, the preserved samples also come with detailed clinical notes, which can help modern researchers make post-mortem diagnoses. And perhaps most usefully, the brains have not been altered by modern medicines, offering an untainted view of the physiology of a schizophrenic mind. Extracting DNA and RNA from these jellied brains has proven difficult, however, although researchers were able to extract DNA after the samples were stored in liquid nitrogen. The work has not yet been peer-reviewed or published, but if the DNA extraction methods are validated, it could yield a new database of brain information. Check out the full story over at Scientific American.

[Scientific American]

As the world's largest and most popular TV manufacturer, it's worth paying attention to the direction they take at the high end. This year, that high end is defined by their own 55-inch OLED TV, which it sounds like they intend to actually sell this year.

Unlike LG, who rolled out their own 55-inch OLED while staying quiet about availability details, Samsung said their Super OLED set would be "coming this year." Viewed from a distance on stage, it seemed to carry OLED's signature eye-melting color, liquid-smooth response time and deep, deep blacks. It'll also ship with Samsung's full Smart TV package, which now includes a built-in camera and microphone for voice- and gesture-recognition interfaces and video conferencing. No word on cost, but, assume it's damn expensive. It'll be interesting to see when more concrete release details roll out, but if Samsung manages to deliver, they'll join Sony as the only company to ever actually sell an OLED television (we awarded Sony's XEL-1 OLED a Best of What's New award when it debuted way back in 2008).

We're still excited to hear more about whether LG intends to roll out their own 55-inch set this year. Hope so. And we'll see if Sony has a similar offering in a few hours at their own press conference later. Stay tuned.

Follow along with all of our CES 2012 coverage here.

Camouflage works by confusing the brain. Disruptive patterns obscure a form's outline, making objects less likely to stand out. But camo has a weakness: No pattern works for every environment. Special Operations Apps, a software design firm in Wilmington, N.C., has developed a process to make site-specific camouflage.

The software combines photographs of a given location, taken by satellites, drones or reconnaissance teams, into customized, terrain-specific patterns that can be printed directly on a garment. Because the pattern is made from images taken at various focal lengths, it also inhibits depth perception, making it more difficult for the brain to process camouflaged surfaces into a single object. For now, use of site-specific camouflage will be limited to Special Operations units. And it could be short-lived.

Special Operations Apps recently filed a patent on an "adaptive" material that consists of a vinyl substrate, a flexible image display that could adjust to a given environment, and thermoelectric panels that could modify a soldier's heat signature.

Read more about the invisible warriors of the future: The engineering breakthroughs that will make everything from planes to subs to soldiers...disappear.

• The Successor to the B2 Stealth Bomber
• The Next Generation of Silent Submarines
• Metamaterials That Bring Invisibility Within Reach
• Future Tanks Will Be Cooler, and Thus Invisible to Thermal Detection
• Next-Generation Surveillance Robots Can Analyze Their Environment

Drones: they're not just for controversial cross-border airstrikes anymore. Physicist Jason Barnes has designed a robotic aircraft that could cruise the methane skies of Saturn's moon Titan almost indefinitely, beaming data and images back to Earth and terminating with extreme prejudice any terrorist threats it encounters there (we made that last part up).

AVIATR is Barnes's concept for an aerial drone powered by two small nuclear generators (known as Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generators, or ASRGs) that could stay airborne over Titan pretty much indefinitely. The ASRGs together would only provide about 250 watts, or enough to power two light bulbs. But Titan makes flying easy and non-energy-intensive--it exerts seven times less gravity than Earth and hosts an atmosphere that's three times denser.

In fact, the most energy-intensive task AVIATR would face is beaming information back to Earth. To do so, the drone would climb to nearly 9 miles up, then divert all of its power to its datalink while gliding back down to 2 miles. Scientific data would include imagery captured from both high and low altitudes and information on the methane rains that shower Titan's surface, as well as other atmospheric data.

On such a mission, the drone would enter Titan's airspace in an aeroshell with a parachute that would slow the entire package way down. AVIATR would then eject from the aeroshell, fire up its ASRGs and propeller, and deploy on what would likely be a one-year mission--though, as noted above, AVIATR could really stay aloft for years upon years barring mechanical failure of some kind.

Plus, it could provide strategic air support for the boats deployed on Titan's methane lakes. That is, if either boat or plane ever makes it off the ground here on Earth. Titan is one of the more interesting bodies in the solar system (says me), but it didn't get a nod from the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, which helps NASA prioritize its missions. That means if AVIATR does launch, it likely won't be before the late 2020s.

[SPACE]

Vancouver-based quantum computer maker D-Wave Systems is the kind of company that often gets mixed reviews--either kudos for working on the very edge of a new and potentially groundbreaking technology, or dismissal for not exactly delivering the kind of Earth-shattering technology that people were perhaps expecting. Regardless, today D-Wave is marking one in the win column after announcing that it has achieved the world's largest quantum computation using 84 qubits.

A quick quantum computing primer: qubits, or quantum bits, are the basic units of quantum information, comparable to (but quite different from) a classical bit. The main benefit of qubits is that they can exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to exist in two states simultaneously. In comparison to classical computing, that means a single superconducting qubit can exist as both a "one" and a "zero" at the same time, whereas a classical bit can only be one or the other.

This vastly improves speed and computing power. It also has proven pretty difficult to execute. A decade ago quantum computers were using a handful of qubits to factorize numbers and do other grade-school level computations. And in recent years, they haven't come much further forward, even as D-Wave released a $10 million 128-qubit quantum computer for sale.

To prove that quantum computing really is pushing forward, Zhengbing Bian at D-Wave used one of the company's machines to tackle a very difficult calculation known as a "two-color Ramsey number." This is somewhat explained by the "theorum on friends and strangers," which you can feel free to read up on but will not be explained in detail here for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that I can't begin to adequately/coherently explain it. But the math isn't the point here. The point is that the math is mind-numbingly difficult, and the quantum computer solved it in just 270 milliseconds.

The system required just 28 qubits to actually solve the Ramsey problem, using the other 56 for error correction. And, because this was a Ramsey problem that has already been solved by conventional means, Bian and company know that their D-Wave computer came up with the correct solution (it was 8).

Whether or not this glowing achievement is going to boost confidence in D-Wave's technology and approach is yet to be seen, but the company already has some support in industry. A certain Mountain View-based Internet search company has taken an active interest in D-Wave's computing technology, and last year Lockheed Martin bought one of D-Wave's quantum computers for itself.

[Technology Review]

Our friends over at Popular Photography, with whom we've been working and drinking all through CES, just published their own list of the best new gear at this year's show. Assuming you've already read our roundup, you should click on over to Pop Photo--some pretty great photography equipment was announced this year, from new cameras and lenses to innovative accessories.

We can fit everything we knew before today about Criegee biradicals inside the period at the end of this sentence, but from what we understand they are pretty amazing. At least, that's the word from a team of researchers form the U. of Manchester, the U. of Bristol, and Sandia National Labs, who have just detected these invisible chemical intermediates for the first time. Apparently they can not only oxidize pollutants from combustion, cleaning up the atmosphere as they go, but they also contribute to cloud formation, helping to cool the planet.

Criegee biradicals were first hypothesized in the 1950s by German chemist Rudolf Criegee, but at that point in time it was impossible to detect them or measure them, so it was unknown whether or not they truly existed and, if so, how fast they reacted with other atoms. Finding and measuring them was made possible by a special device rigged up by Sandia researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs' Advanced Light Source, which allowed them to discern the formation and eliminate other similar molecules that contain the same atoms but in a different structure.

What they found in doing so, we're told, is quite promising. Criegee biradicals react more rapidly than researchers previously thought they could with aforementioned pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, leaving behind nitrate and sulfate that lead to aerosol formation and eventually cloud formation. Ultimately, Criegee biradicals could help cool the planet.

Moreover, understanding them should lend atmospheric researchers some insight on the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere as a whole as well as help lead to better understandings of climate and how pollution affects the air around us.

The world's smallest magnetic data storage unit is made of just 12 atoms, squeezing an entire byte into just 96 atoms, a significant shrinkage in the world of information storage. It's not a quantum computer, but it's a computer storage unit at the quantum scale. By contrast, modern hard disk drives use about a million atoms to store a single bit, and a half billion atoms per byte.

Until now, it was unclear how many (or how few) atoms would be needed to build a reliable, lasting memory bit, the basic piece of information that a computer understands. Researchers at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science decided to start from the ground up, building a magnetic memory bit atom-by-atom. They used a scanning tunneling microscope to create regular patterns of iron atoms aligned in rows of six each. They found two rows was enough to securely store one bit, and eight pairs of rows was enough to store a byte.

Data was written into and read out of the bits using the STM - so it's not like this type of bit will be integrated into hard disks anytime soon. But it answers some fundamental questions about the nature of classical mechanical systems, said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research Almaden and an author on a new paper describing the teeny bit. The team was interested in the transition from quantum to classical behavior, he said.

"If you take a single atom, you have to look at quantum mechanics when you describe its behavior," he said in an interview. "As you make the (system) bigger and bigger, several iron atoms start talking to each other, and at some point you can ignore all of this quantum behavior and just think of them as a classical magnetic structure." It turns out that point is around 12 atoms big.

"Many people would anticipate you would have to use quantum mechanical systems to describe these structures," Heinrich said. "That was the most surprising thing to me."

At the smallest scales, quantum effects blur stored information. A bit using six atoms would switch magnetic states - switching from "0" to "1" - about 1,000 times per second, for instance, which is much too frequently to be useful for data storage, Heinrich said. Eight atoms switch states once per second. But 12 atoms switched their states infrequently enough to be usable for storage - instead, an outside magnetic influence (in this case, the STM) changes their states. The nano magnets are only stable at a chilly 5 degrees Kelvin, or -450 degrees F.

The other breakthrough in this paper is the bits' antiferromagnetism - this marks the first time antiferromagnetism has been used to store data. Ferromagnets, used in most modern data storage and other applications, use magnetic interactions between iron atoms to align all the atoms in a single direction. This creates a magnetic field that can be read out. This becomes a problem at the teeniest scales, however, because tightly packed magnetic bits can interfere with each other - this limits the downsizing of data storage systems. But this new 12-atom bit uses antiferromagnetism - the atoms are aligned in opposite directions, meaning they spin in alternating directions. The iron atoms were separated by nitrogen atoms and induced with the STM to spin differently, Heinrich said. This allowed them to be packed closer together, greatly increasing storage density.

The researchers switched the bit's magnetic state five times to store the ASCII code for each letter of the word "think," one of Big Blue's slogans.

Sebastian Loth, who left IBM for CFEL four months ago and is lead author of the paper, said the 12-atom bit raises plenty of new questions for classical computing at quantum scales.

"We can now use this ability to investigate how quantum mechanics kicks in. What separates quantum magnets from classical magnets? How does a magnet behave at the frontier between both worlds? These are exciting questions that soon could be answered," he said.

The paper appears in this week's issue of Science.