Researchers at the University of Southampton have recently developed a new type of glass that can permanently preserve stored data. They used lasers to add tiny dots, known as three-dimensional pixels (somewhat like 3D pixels), to pure silicon glass, thereby changing the way light passes through the glass. An optical decoder can read these "voxels" and allow the user to write, delete or overwrite the data. The storage capacity of this new material far exceeds that of traditional hard drives. A piece of glass the size of a mobile phone screen can store 50GB of data. At the same time, this new material will not cause excessive temperature problems during storage. The person in charge of the project team said that this new storage method is stable, safe, and portable, and is very useful for institutions with large amounts of archives. It is reported that the University of Southampton is planning to cooperate with a company in Lithuania to put this technology into actual production.
