Researchers at HP Labs are building a device that could vastly increase the amount of information you can store on a camera memory card -- or any device's memory, for that matter. They are testing the first circuit boards that combine conventional transistors with a new kind of electronic element called a "memristor".

They already made history by discovering this new kind of electronic element, a holy grail of electronics.

For more than 250 years, there was the capacitor to control electric charge, the resistor to control voltage, and the inductor to control electromagnetism. But no one was able to build the fourth mystery element, the memristor. This year, at HP Labs in Palo Alto, a team of researchers led by Dr. Stan Williams succeeded.

The mysterious last electronic component.

What is it good for? For starters, lots and lots of information storage.

"For example," offers Stan William, "the flash memory type of system, where you could effectively take days worth of video on a form factor that's the size of today's thumb drives. That would be an obvious application."

Williams is a Senior Research Fellow at the lab. Because memristors are so tiny, he says, they could enable installation of microscopic sensors inside every cellphone, turning it into a chemical detector.

Williams envisions just such a vast network monitoring the quality of food, air and water across the whole planet, "...by having people act as local nodes on a network as well, where their PDA or their cellphone has sensors in it. In that way, as they're walking around, they are essentially sampling the environment themselves."

Williams calls this global web CeNSE, for "Central Nervous System for Earth". We call it Terratwitter.