Computer chip manufacturers are fast running out of room on conventional, flat circuit boards. So for the next generation of chips, the only way is up.

Researchers have developed a way to draw the circuit directly into a block of glass. They added gold oxide to the glass, focused short laser pulses on specific points inside the block to dislodge individual atoms of gold, and heated the block to 550 ºC, causng the gold atoms to coalesce into 7 nm. nanodots. The presence or absence of a nanodot at each point within a three-dimensional grid could signal a bit of computer data.