...to finally phasing out all laser discs, and possibly mechanical hard discs too. If the price comes down enough, I'd expect a future where all media is solid state, including rental movies and software.

I wonder how many read / write cycles the technology can manage before the cracks crack. I think graphite is somewhat resistant to EM fields, compared to transistors, so I bet the military are watching this develop with a distant interest.

I think this will be an interesting one to watch and / or invest in.

All those nice people sending me emails about c1alis and v1agra will be enhappied with this news.

simple yet effective

Well done boffins

... for the USB Pencil drive.

No Its not! Not in this useage.. remeber EM fields induce current/voltage in conductors, be that wires, pcb tracks or silicon tracks or graphite tracks... apply significant current/voltage to Graphite 'cell' and it heals.. Therefore EM will wipe the memory.

EM affects any memory that is writen by magnetic/electrical means and also anything that can be overwritten by spurious current in the control circuitry! (imagine a non electrical say a special glass light memory, if an em pulse caused an led to light it could overwrite light memory! even though the memory medium itself would not be affected.)

to give a sincere and utterly grovelling welcome our new carbon based overlords.

How resistent is that to being dropped? and if it breaks or your desperate to give someone some data and don't have a PC to hand can you just crack it open and write the data down manually (albeit in truely write once operation)

@Sam Green

Nice word. Well done!

But I only let her put lead in mine.