But how, the plastic shouldn’t it have disappeared? The direction is this. But there is no need to sing victory. There are those who have thought of using it to get inside ours digital data, the ones we store on computer hard drives in the form of 1’s and 0’s. And to think that Eric Anslyn, the scientist who managed to bottle data in plastic, didn’t want to do this, but was trying to create molecules to make products more efficient. pharmaceuticals and dishwasher detergents. A chat with some fellow programmers was enough for the professor at the University of Texas at Austin to understand that the urethane oligomers he was experimenting with could do better: store data and information. This is not the first time they have been used synthetic polymers to store data, but previously the information encoding process was based on binary code, while now it has been possible to make everything work using the hexadecimal code, with significant advantages in storage density.
Research
In their experiment, researchers at the University of Texas have memorized a text from an early 19th century novel in plastic molecules: Mansfield Park of Jane Austen, scientist’s favorite writer. Anslyn’s team wrote this meaningful quote in the plastic: “If one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere“. The message is clear: happiness, try and try again, then you will find it somewhere. And Anslyn found it in his experiment: his team encoded the 153 characters of the original quote into a 632-character bit string and then converted them to hexadecimal with special software. Final result: 158 characters, only five more than the original information. According to the researchers, an outcome with an “amazing” potential: a paradigm shift in the storage of data that will allow them to be stored in an ever smaller physical space in the future.
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The advantages of the new approach
The researchers drew inspiration from nature, borrowing its symbolic code, the way it assembles molecules. Not to copy them and obtain similar ones, but “to create our own inventions”, as the chemist who led the experiment explains. With the advantage of using compounds made from hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon: elements that, in addition to being abundant on Earth, allow us to overcome some significant drawbacks of storing data on silicon. Between these, stability e longevity. Data needs these features more and more. We produce a huge amount of them every day and if it is true that they are the new oil, we cannot risk losing them: once they are stored somewhere, they should remain there. forever.
The future of data storage
«Reliable data storage – reads the Research of the University of Texas – is becoming one of the most significant technological challenges of the digital age ». To win it, everything is being invented. It has even succeeded in store the data in the DNA, which would be able to preserve them intact for hundreds of thousands of years. The whole internet could take up the space of a shoe box. With which, were it not for the costs still prohibitive of technology, we could give plastic a good kick.
And instead, it seems, we will still use it to create the hard drives and datacenters of tomorrow. A digital world of plastic that, in the meantime, scientists are trying to make eco-sustainable: if they can, instead of archiving it forever, we will use plastic to archive it forever.
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