This article presents information on a research conducted by researchers in Japan on nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a more prosaic, though still impressive, vision of electronic circuits scaled down from the size of a micron, a millionth of a metre, to that of a nanometre, a thousand times smaller still. That is the view taken in Japan, and so a way to store information in dots only a few atoms wide has been hailed in the press as a nanotechnology breakthrough, opening the way to data storage. The discovery, made by Akinobu Sato and Yuji Sakamoto at the Functional Devices Research Laboratory in Kawasaki, Japan was somewhat serendipitous. The researchers were studying a compound containing vanadium oxide with a scanning tunnelling microscope, a device that uses a sharp metal tip to sense atomic-scale features. At room temperature, the oxide conducts electricity poorly; when heated, though, it turns into a metal-like structure that conducts well. The researchers were trying to find out how the transition from one state to the other happened.