A group of nano-scientists has discovered a way to arrange individual atoms to store and rewrite data 500 times more efficiently than the best hard drives on the market.

A team of researchers from the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain has made a major breakthrough in so-called atomic memory — an approach that stores one bit of data on each atom with a goal of creating a new kind of tiny data storage device of the future.

With this technology, little patterns of atoms can be arranged to represent English characters, fitting the content of more than a billion books onto the surface of a stamp.