Molecular Data Storage. A team of scientists at the University of Manchester recently made a breakthrough with a technology that allows high volumes of data to be stored within individual molecules. They’ve shown the ability to create high-density storage that could save 25,000 gigabits of data on something the size of a quarter.
They achieved the breakthrough using molecules that contain the element dysprosium (that’s going to send you back to the periodic table) cooled to a temperature of -213 centigrade. At that temperature the molecules retain magnetic alignment. Previously this has taken molecules cooled to a temperature of -259 C. The group’s goal is to find a way to do this at -196 C, the temperature of affordable liquid nitrogen, which would make this a viable commercial technology.
The most promising use of this kind of dense storage would be in large data centers since this storage is 100 times more dense than existing technologies. This would make data centers far more energy efficient while also speeding up computing. This kind of improvement since there are predictions that within 25 years data centers will be the largest user of electricity on the planet.
Bloodstream Electricity. Researchers at Fudan University in China have developed a way to generate electricity from a small device immersed in the bloodstream. The device uses stationary nanoscale carbon fibers that act like a tiny hydropower generator. They’ve named the device as ‘fiber-shaped fluidic nanogenerator” (FFNG).
Obviously there will need to be a lot of testing to make sure that the devices don’t cause problems like blood clots. But the devices hold great promise. A person could use these devices to charge a cellphone or wearable device. They could be used to power pacemakers and other medical devices. They could be inserted to power chips in farm animals that could be used to monitor and track them, or used to monitor wildlife.
Light Data Storage. Today’s theme seems to be small, and researchers at Caltech have developed a small computer chip that is capable of temporarily storing data using individual photons. This is the first team that has been able to reliably capture photons in a readable state on a tiny device. This is an important step in developing quantum computers. Traditional computers store data as either a 1 or a 0, but quantum computers store also can store data that is both a 1 and 0 simultaneously. This has shown to be possible with photons.
Quantum computing devices need to be small and operate at the nanoscale because they hold data only fleetingly until it can be processed, and nanochips can allow rapid processing. The Caltech device is small around the size of a red blood cell. The team was able to store a photon for 75 nanoseconds, and the ultimate goal is to store information for a full millisecond.
Photon Data Transmission. Researchers at the University of Ottowa have developed a technology to transmit a secure message using photons that are carrying more than one bit of information. This is a necessary step in developing data transmission using light, which would free the world from the many limitations of radio waves and spectrum.
Radio wave data transmission technologies send one bit of data at a time with each passing wavelength. Being able to send more than one bit of data with an individual proton creates the possibility of being able to send massive amounts of data through the open atmosphere. Scientists have achieved the ability to encode multiple bits with a proton in the lab, but is the first time it’s been done through the atmosphere in a real-world application.
The scientists are now working on a trial between two locations that are almost three miles apart and that will use a technology they call adaptive optics that can compensate for atmospheric turbulence.
There are numerous potential uses for the technology in our industry. This could be used to create ultrahigh-speed connections between a satellite and earth. It could be used to transmit data without fiber between locations with a clear line-of-sight. It could used as a secure method of communications with airplanes since small light beams can’t be intercepted or hacked.
The other use of the technology is to leverage the ability of photons to carry more than one bit of data to create a new kind of encryption that should be nearly impossible to break. The photon data transmission allows for the use of 4D quantum encryption to carry the keys needed to encrypt and decrypt packets, meaning that every data packet could use a different encryption scheme.