DECLAN HARTE

It is enough to boggle the mind of mobile music lovers. Scottish scientists have discovered a way to cram three billion songs on to an MP3 player.

Researchers at Glasgow University's chemistry department have developed a tiny switch which can increase by 150,000 times the storage capacity of an iPod - without increasing the size of the player itself.

This presents the prospect of storing 950 years' worth of songs on a single device.

Professor Lee Cronin and Dr Malcolm Kadodwala have developed a molecule-sized switch allowing data capacity to be increased dramatically.

Currently, an 80gb iPod classic is able to hold up to 20,000 songs, but, thanks to the Scottish research, the same sized iPod would be able to hold up to three billion songs.

The switch, which is made up of two clusters of molecules positioned just 32 millionths of a millimetre apart, allows scientists to easily manipulate an electrical field.

Once these switches are placed on a surface made of gold or carbon, they can fit up to one billion transistors on to a single chip, more than five times the current limit.

This could allow up to 500,000 gigabytes of storage to be held on a microchip no bigger than a two-pence coin. The present limit for the same space is 3.3 gigabytes.

The pace of progress has always been determined by the size and technical limitations of the silicon chip, something that could very well be rendered obsolete by the recent breakthrough.

Professor Cronin said: "We probably now have a road map to storing an unimaginable amount of information and by the time we get to the end I'm sure it will be useful for so much more than just storing MP3s."