News - SSDs stand aside, magnetic bacteria drives are on the way!

[HEXUS]

Iron eating bacteria create nanomagnets and nanowires.

Read more.

[Ford Prefect]

From reading the above I think there's still time to get some useful life from an SSD!

[kingpotnoodle]

Star Trek Voyager's bio-gel packs is what sprung to my mind... or the alive in the mountain eat the world aliens in Crysis... nevermind Skynet!

[=assassin=]

It's amazing to discover completely new concepts like this. I wonder how many years it'll take to become a usable component though.

[Roobubba]

Hmm, don't even have access to that journal from work... I'd certainly be interested to see the original paper, rather than a re-hashed media-friendly version (no offense!)

[Lord Midas]

Amazing. They are literally using bacteria poo...

the proteins do all the hard work; they gather the iron, create the most magnetic compound, and arrange it into regularly-sized cubes."

[jonyb82]

Amazing. They are literally using bacteria poo...

Not exactly....

What happens is that we only use the DNA from the magnetotatic bacteria, E. coli is then engineered to make the biominerialisation protein found in the bacteria which is extracted and attached to a gold surface in a pattern of squares. The fact that magnetic nanoparticles then mineralise on this protein outside of the cell is the discovery.

The surface patterning is currently 10's of micrometers, but if reduced in size could be used for high density magnetic media. There are probably a lot of alternative methods to do this in the near future that would be more reliable and cost effective.

[hiyayhi]

Wow this looks great when can i buy this... 50 years later.