It's one of those things that deserves an expression like "a new mousetrap," because if someone were to invent a better one, that would change the industry immediately, to the inventor's great fortune.

Now that very thing has happened, and a new transistor design could cut the entire world's energy usage by around 5%, by reducing the number of individual transistors needed to store data by three-quarters.

Millions of transistors line the surface of every modern microchip, which itself is manufactured in staggering numbers around the world, reaching into the trillions. However, the microchip is now reaching the limit of how small it can be made—and with that, how much heat can be dispersed from the electronic demands of modern computing by something that's only 25 silicon molecules-thick.