A land mark in history of storage is sure to take place in short future, as scientists encode a moving image into gas. And this invention is path breaking unlike our conventional, reels, DVDs, blu ray and what not. The novel invention has inspired a youtube tribute on the paper title, 'Temporally Multiplexed Storage of Images in a Gradient Echo Memory'. The University of Maryland's embarked on the project

As yet, there are not many practical uses for the technique, which stores information in tiny vials of rubidium, by beaming light into a 20cm long tube. To play back, the magnetic field is flipped backwards, the control beam turned back on, and the atoms start to move in the opposite direction. Beyond simply creating a new storage medium, and presumably inspiring George Lucas to re-release the Star Wars films in gaseous form, the gas can store 'quantum' information - and once it's refined, could be a crucial building block for the computers of the future. (With Inputs from Internet- Aarkay)