A material that could allow super-dense (125 gigabytes per square inch) “millipede”-style data storage systems to work at room temperature (and thus be a viable commercial product) has been developed by researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology in Kyungbuk, Korea.

The system uses a “baroplastic” — a hard polymer that becomes soft when placed under pressure — and the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) to etch the kind of tiny pits that store data.