A team of physicists led by Alex Zettl of the University of California, Berkeley, has created a carbon nanotube–based electromechanical memory device that they say can store bits safely for up to a billion years. Details of the advance, which is being acknowledged by independent experts as a breakthrough. Zettl and his colleagues constructed their memory device by taking an iron nanocrystal and placing it inside a hollow carbon nanotube. The iron particle is able to shuttle back and forth.