Here is an article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I suspect that many (or most?) all computer owners will be interested:

From an article by Peter Ray Allison  published in the livescience.com web site:

Scientists have developed a new type of optical disc that can increase information storage capacity to the "petabit" level — 125 terabytes of data, or the combined storage capacity of about 15,000 DVDs. 

Optical discs, such as DVDs and Blu-ray discs, are durable and inexpensive. A standard single-layer Blu-ray disc can store 25 gigabytes. By comparison, some USB flash drives can store 1TB, and hard disk drives (HDDs) can hold up to 16TB.

But a team of scientists has created a new type of material, called "dye-doped photoresist with aggregation-induced emission luminogens" (AIE-DDPR) with a high areal density (the amount of data that can be stored in a given area) that can offer far denser storage capacity than typical HDDs). 

Given the increasing amount of data we generate each day, from instant messages to streaming video, AIE-DDPR optical discs have the potential to revolutionize data storage. Optical discs take up less space than current storage methods, be more environmentally friendly and could become less expensive than data storage arrays.

They described the details in a paper published Feb. 21 in the journal Nature.

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/mvfxvyvv.