Graphene, a single-atom thick sheet of carbon, has become the focus of a lot of research (and a Nobel Prize) because it has an interesting electronic property: electrons move through the material as if they have no mass. But it's only one of a number of single-atom thick materials that have been discovered, and some of the others have very different properties, acting as semiconductors or insulators.
The discoveries raise the prospect of building more complex electronic devices out of a series of these materials, with each part being only a single atom thick. Now, researchers have used two of these materials—graphene and molybdenum disulfide—and put them together with some more traditional components to make a flash memory device. Although the work is very preliminary, with some of the parts being assembled by hand under a microscope, it shows some excellent properties, like the potential to store more than one bit per device and the ability to retain its state for over a decade.
