(Phys.org)—In 2015, scientists discovered a new magnetoresistance effect—that is, a new way in which magnetization affects a material’s electric resistance—but hadn’t yet found a promising application for the discovery, beyond the existing technologies. Now in a new paper, the same researchers have demonstrated that the effect can be used to design memories with four distinct stable magnetic states, allowing the memories to store four bits of information in a single magnetic structure.