storage

With the move to the new shop, I've been forced to revisit our approach to storage and organization. The first area to get the treatment was the stash of valves, miscellaneous bearings, telephone parts, solenoids and a few thousand other small to mid-sized parts. At this point in time, it looks like Rubbermaid is my savior.

I can't seem to manage to keep my iPod in my bag for a day without creating an awful tangle of headphones, but my body's cells can work with two meters of stringy DNA into a tiny nucleus without making a knot. The secret is a structure called a fractal globule, according to a research paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

Today, General Electric unveiled a next-generation optical storage technology that can pack as much as 20 Blu-Ray discs or a hundred DVDs' worth of data onto a single disc. The newly devised discs, which use holograms to store data in the form of bits, can hold 500 gigabytes of information, the company says.

PogoPlug, available in North America as of today, is a cheap, straightforward, single-purpose device that aims to transform network-attached storage into an appliance. It combines any old USB hard drive with your existing Internet connection, and then, voila: everything delicious and convenient about network-attached storage is now within reach.