Superman’s memory crystals now exist

Your computer might soon use discs made of glass to save data thanks to researchers from University of Southampton who have developed memory crystals using nanostructured glass. The device seems similar to the one seen on the Superman movies.

Researchers used laser beams to alter the glass and make it possible to store memory, just like The Man of Steel does in his Fortress of Solitude.

According to the scientists the glass shards can store up to 50GB of data, equivalent of a whole Blu-ray disc on the size of a mobile phone screen. The crystals can not only store more data but are also less prone to overheating and damage like conventional storage media. The discs can withstand a temperature of 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and last for 4,000 years without the quality of the data degrading.

The process works by putting tiny dots called voxels into pure silica glass which changed the way light moves through it. These structures can then be read using an optical decoder, allowing the users to read and write data as much as they like.

“We have improved the quality and fabrication time and we have developed this five-dimensional memory, which means that data can be stored on the glass and last forever,” said Martynas Beresna, lead researcher for the project. “No one has done this before.”

“It could become a very stable and safe form of portable memory. It could also be very useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because memory has a relatively short lifespan.”
“Museums who want to preserve info or places, would really benefit,” Daily Mail quoted Martynas. The researchers are now working with a Lithuanian company to market the crystals.

In the Superman film series, the Fortress of Solitude was created by a crystal placed aboard a spacecraft Superman is put on to escape the war on his home planet of Krypton. The teenage Clark Kent ends up in an ice field thought to be in the Arctic and when he throws it into the floor it becomes a cavernous crystal complex.

The memory crystals contain holograms and sound recordings of Superman’s parents Jor-El and Lara which are accessed by placing a crystal stick into a glass pipe.