Cantilever?
Dunno why they call it a cantilever, it is a simple spring as far as I can see, but ingenious non the less.
Edinburgh researchers and others have devised a way to use nano-cantilevers to charge carbon nanotube transistors with binary values faster and more power-efficiently than NAND cells get charged. Once again the scientists raise the possibility of their invention replacing flash, as many have done before. As reported in Nature …
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The ant doesn't go splat because its terminal velocity is small. Try dropping an ant glued to the bottom of a hard drive: it will go splat indeed. But I agree with you that any such danger is probably easily mitigated by mechanical isolation, as is currently done in hard drives: read heads do not like being slammed into the magnetic media either.