Nobel winners' discovery led to your iPod

This years Nobel Prize 2007 is given to the two scientists whose discovery revolutionized digital data storage, their research allows millions to sway to music on their iPods and to store a lifetime's photographs on palm-size devices.

Peter Gruenberg of Germany and Albert Fert of France were recognized for their independent discovery of giant magnetoresistance - an exotic phenomenon whose practical applications became ubiquitous in everyday life in less than two decades.

Among the results: The palm-size external hard drive that can hold a good chunk of your local library. The iPod that allows you to carry a thousand songs in your pocket. The computing revolution that allows your laptop to hold more information than a 19th-century warehouse.

"The raw understanding of how nature works is a great thing," Dean, vice president for research at IBM said. "The application of that knowing how nature works in the creation of something my mother can use is another great breakthrough - and as significant."

Their discovery that ultra-thin slices of metal have different electrical properties in a magnetic field not only changed the musical and computing habits of the entire planet but also altered the very landscape of how people think about information, and the ways in which music, movies and ideas can be shared.

Packing information into ever-more-compact spaces is at the heart of the success of devices such as the iPod. That success would have been impossible without the scientific discovery honored Tuesday.

The phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, is one of those ideas that seems impossible until someone shows how it can be done, and then it seems obvious. Hundreds of laboratories and companies today are expanding on Fert's and Gruenberg's idea, with results more striking than anything they had originally visualized.

How it works

Although giant magnetoresistance does sound a bit like one of those mutants in the "X-Men" movie series, it actually describes a phenomenon at the junction of electricity and magnetism: When two layers of a metal such as iron are separated by a thin layer of another metal such as chromium, the application of a magnetic field can change the resistance of the structure - which determines how much electricity will flow through it.

Without giant magnetoresistance, a lot of information still could be packed into a tiny space, but it would be unreadable. Effectively, GMR technology provides a sort of magnifying glass that allows electronic devices to read very tiny letters.

Fert, 69, is a professor at the University of Paris-Sud, in Orsay, France . Born in Carcassonne, France, he is married and has two children. Gruenberg, 68, was born in Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic. Now a German citizen, he works at the Institute of Solid State Research, which is part of a scientific facility known as Research Center Juelich in western Germany. He is married and has three children.