seen this before (Score 2, Interesting)

Reading through the article, I noticed the following tidbit:

Eventually, "instead of moving them, we [picked] up the atoms," using a scanning tunneling microscope, he said.

This reminded me of an invention touted by one of my old professors at MIT. Low and behold, a search at the US patent office turned up this patent filed in 1994 for a high density dimer memory device which utilizes a scanning tunneling microscope

. . .which in response to being placed in intimate contact with the lower atom of a selected dimer results in an interatomic bond which accommodates pulling the lower atom upward and thus pulling the upper atom downward so as to effect a change in the dimer angle.

Looks like this isn't so novel after all.