There are two categories of data compression. The first reduces the size of a single file to save storage space and transmit faster. The second is for storage and transmission convenience.

A compression technique that does not decompress digital data back to 100% of the original. Lossy methods can provide high degrees of compression and result in smaller compressed files ...

A team of IBM researchers just created the world's smallest magnet using a solitary atom -- and if that wasn't enough of a challenge, they packed it with one bit of digital data for good measure.