Number 145 (Story #3), September 28, 1993 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein NANOMAGNETS EXHIBIT BISTABILITY . A Florence-Rio de Janiero-Grenoble team of scientists have chemically prepared 12-ion clusters of manganese and observed that at temperatures of 4 K the clusters retain their magnetization for some time and exhibit pronounced hysteresis; that is, for a given value of an external magnetic field, the clusters can reside in one of two magnetic states. This feature, the scientists believe, could lead to information storage at the molecular level if ever a way can be found to address individual clusters. (R. Sessoli et al., Nature, 9 Sept. 1993.)