This morning’s New York Times reports on advances made by researchers at Rice and at HP on overcoming some barriers that seemed to be standing in the way of continuing miniaturization of computing devices. Investigators at both places are surprised and pleased at the discovery, which uses new approaches, allegedly discovered at least in part by accident, in the design and manufacture of computer chips with advanced processing and storage capabilities that are also very small. HP has already moved to begin manufacture of some test devices with modest capacities, but which could be scaled up quickly if they prove successful.

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