Nobel goes to men who made iPod

clipped from blogs.usatoday.com Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg each discovered a phenomenon -- called giant magnetoresistance -- that allows a computer to read information stored magnetically on a disk. The men who made iPods possible learned this morning that they won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. "I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry. Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime," Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, tells the Associated Press. Reuters has some information about the discovery.