The highest capacity we've heard of for current optical storage media is the Blu-Ray disc, whose double-layer format comes in at a monstrous 50GB capacity. That just might change in the next few years, as an ongoing research project has found a way to cram three times that capacity (150GB) into a DVD-sized disk, with plans to pump it up to a further 500GB by 2008.

The program, dubbed the Microholas Project, is under the supervision of the Institute of Optics and Optical Technologies at the Technical University of Berlin. The project team, under the direction of Dr. Susanna Orlic, managed to pull off this engineering feat by a process called microholographic recording, which they described as such on their home site:

On a microholographic disk the pit-land structure of a CD or DVD is replaced by microscopic volume gratings. These "microgratings" are holographically induced in the focal region of two counter propagating, highly focused laser beams: one beam is focused into the photosensitive layer and reflected back. The interference pattern of the incident and reflected beam results in a grating-like modulation of the refractive index of the storage medium.

In layman's terms, microholography recording creates three-dimensional holographic grids within the disk's nanostructure for storing and reading data. In comparison, traditional CD/DVD recording techniques use a two-dimensional pit-land structure that only uses the disc's surface for recording data.

Don't start turning in your HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players, though, as the Microholas Project's 150GB disk mentioned earlier is just a demonstrator of things to come. The team expects to have an even bigger 1 Terabyte disk out by 2010, with an expected read speed of 250 Mbits.

Scientists in Germany have finally figured out a way to read people's minds.

PhysOrg.com reports that a team from Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience is definitely breaking new psychic ground with their research. The team, led by Dr. John-Dylan Haynes, used MRI machines to track and identify brain activity in order to predict whether their subjects would add or subtract two given numbers.

Before you go all bonkers and start hoarding tinfoil to make into "protective hats," please note that this is only possible through the use of an MRI machine, and it's not very accurate. In fact, the 71 percent accuracy rate is only about 20 percent more successful than random selection.

"It's really weird," said Tanja Steinbach, a 21-year-old Leipzig student who participated in the experiment. "But since I know they're only able to do this if they have certain machines, I'm not worried that everybody else on the street can read my mind."

Still, the research has managed to stir up some interest in the scientific community. "Haynes' experiment strikes at the heart of how good we will get at predicting behaviors," said Dr. Todd Braver, an associate professor in the department of psychology at Washington University. "The barriers that we assumed existed in reading our minds keep getting breached."

Haynes, meanwhile, envisions more benign uses (i.e., not in any way similar to "Minority Report") for the research. For example, he says it could contribute to the development of machines already in existence that respond to brain signals and allow the paralyzed to change TV channels, surf the Internet, and operate small robotic devices.