Every year we can pack more and more data into a tiny little space. That's great news for your iPods if you want to store countless songs and movies on them.

But just how much further can we keep shrinking things? In 1959 Feynmann famously said "there's plenty of room at the bottom". The thing is, fifty years later, he's still right - and by a lot.

Okay, if you're a non-technie, then skip this paragraph for the juicy bit! Now, for techies out there - lets start with carbon and assume we can encode 1 bit for every 4 carbon atoms. At that density there's over a trillion terabytes of data in one gram. Wow. To put this into perspective, we can think about the amount of data needed to store a year of 3D video at high quality HDTV (1080p). Lets say we have 45Mbit/s for each eye, that's 90Mbit/s for stereo. Well, that's about 350 terabytes per year including when you're sleeping. If we recorded 100 years of footage, that's still only about 23 micrograms of carbon!

Think about that for a minute - your entire life recorded in 3D High-Definition Video. That's every single thing you have ever seen or heard or said or written in your entire life, and it weighs only 23 micrograms - about the weight of a single grain of sand.

If we recorded a year of every single person on the planet, that's a population of 6.6 billion, then its still only 150g of carbon, or in rough kitchen terms - ten tablespoons of water. Just recording everyone in the US would be about 7 grams, about the same as one and a half teaspoons of water.

In a mere kg you could store six years of everyone's life on the planet, like some kind of ultimate YouTube. That's astonishing and somewhat scary all at once! Yes, there really is plenty of room at the bottom...