New rotaxane DVD core being held by a researcher. This central washer will be placed on a film made of rotaxanes. Rotaxanes are molecules that consist of a ring on a dumbbell. The ring can slide to either end of the molecule, so it can encode binary data, 1 and 0 being represented by the ring being at different ends of the molecule. A DVD made using molecules like this would have up to 25 times the storage capacity of a standard 4.5 Gb DVD. Photographed in Italy.