IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

Cool result, major bad title. 1) Moore's law is about transistor size, this is about storing bits. 2) As the article does mention, this doesn't work at room temperature, as the bits are too unreliable. The article says this will work at 150 atoms, which sounds about right, but isn't really substantiated by the actual experiment.

I'd also note that while this is a very cool experiment, the fact that it was performed using a scanning tunneling microscope means it's not exactly a practical device :) But as a proof of principle of storing a bit in a few number of atoms, this is a very neat result.

No hyperbole in the title at all. Moore's law would be smashed if this was ready to release. By the time it is, this will be just another dip to be averaged over.

Sometime, I really wish I had a job where I got to play with individual atoms.

Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3457841

And here I was thinking Moore's Law was related to transistors and not storage...