Imagine taking the entire collection of historical documents at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and storing it on a single DVD.

University of Central Florida Chemistry Professor Kevin D. Belfield and his team have cracked a puzzle that stumped scientists for more than a dozen years. They have developed a new technology that will allow users to record and store massive amounts of data -- the museum’s entire collection or as many as 500 movies, for example -- onto a single disc or, perhaps, a small cube.

Belfield’s Two-Photon 3-D Optical Data Storage system makes this possible.

“For a while, the community has been able to record data in photochromic materials in several layers,” Belfield said. “The problem was that no one could figure out how to read out the data without destroying it. But we cracked it." Read more..