New Polymer Ideal For Secure Data Storage

aphexbrett writes "Clever geometry is the basis of a new material that is said to be ideal for secure data encryption and dense optical information storage. The material consists of a lattice of onionlike spheres in which the particle core and its layers each contain a different dye. The material can hold four or more pieces of information in one spot--not just two as in binary optical data storage. And it opens a door to high-density three-dimensional optical data storage. Read a summary of the research over at C&EN News."

Comments

Every other week

[tliet]

we see an announcement like this. Yet, at the shop, the harddrive is still king.

When do we get a 100 gb solid state disk for 50 dollars?

Re:Every other week

[Lord_Dweomer]

Actually, I had a similar thought, but it ended differently. Every other week we see an announcement like this. It makes me wonder if in ages past, people took innovation and technological advancement like this for granted. Did it feel the same to live in the Renaissance? Seriously, I don't even worry about whether my computer will improve by orders of magnitude by the time I'm ready to purchase my next one.....because I've grown so accustomed to the scientists always beening 10 steps ahead.

Whats more, the technological advances we've made have enabled us to exponentially pick up the pace of our research. Really makes you sit back and ponder what people in the Renaissance could have done if they had the ability to communicate like we do with the net.

If anybody knows of any articles/papers on this topic, I'd love a link to it.

Re:Every other week

[imkonen]

I don't know about the Renaissance, but if you've looked at old magazine's with "cars of the future" predictions, it's pretty amusing. I can't remember where I saw one recently...probably an old Popular Mechanics. They literally look like a cross between what we still percieve of as futuristic (wheel covors and smooth rounded corners) and what we perceive of as old fashion (50s style big fins, gigantic bodies). It's just kind of an amusing reminder that nobody has any idea what technology we'll have at our disposal in the future.

To answer your point a little more on-topic, though, I would bet most people in the Renaissance didn't think about how advanced technology would get. And not just the illiterate masses, but even probably most of the educated members of society. Leonardo De Vinci obviously is famous for all sorts of interesting inventions, but I wonder if he even suspected how much technology would change society as a whole. I think it was the Enlightenment (at least in European history)...around 1700s when science as we know it today really started developping. Maybe not until the industrial revolution (1800s) would people really be cognizant of technological advances occuring during their own lifetimes. Once you start to see changes on that time scale it's a lot easier to imagine the advancement continuing past your lifetime.

But of course, IANAHOAS (I am not a Historian or a sociologist) and I have no links to back it up...this is just stuff dredged out of the depths of my past education.

Almost...

[ErichTheWebGuy]

The material consists of a lattice of onionlike spheres in which the particle core and its layers each contain a different dye.

Not quite as organized as a crystalline structure, but hell, it's almost the data crystal I and all of us have been promised for so many years...

Re:Almost...

[thesp]

Entirely as organised as a crystalline. In fact, structures similar this are indeed termed crystals - see a good site on photonic crystals for examples.

This system consists of a periodic lattice convolved with a basis (the onion). This is in fact the definition of a crystal, as any condensed-matter-physicist will tell you. Any system with this property will disply many analogues of the properties of traditional crystals.

Interesting....but leads to other questions!

[Paul Townend]

It's great that it can store data in a three dimensional way, but the article doesn't seem to mention how robust such a material would be - will the dyes last for a long period of time, and if not, will some dyes fade before others?

Also, I would've liked to see some metrics to give an idea of the capacity such a material has in comparison with some of the recent stuff developed by, for example, IBM. Although I appreciate that it's early days at the moment.

Finally, making a reader for the material is one thing, but I imagine making a writer is an altogether trickier process....how do add and remove all these dye-polymer shells, or is the whole point to have a static, WORM-style data store?

Over my head or over hyped?

[droleary]

I don't see how this is ideal at all. It just seems like a multi-layered dye implementation that is convoluted by application to small spheres instead of to a flat surface. That is, why deal with nano-anything when you can just layer coats of dye on the disk itself? I don't see any way to get 3D storage out of it, either, because you have to get past any one dye layer to get to the next; no bit can be "under" another bit that blocks the same light. For that same reason, I don't see how you can even use a full bit at deeper layers unless all above layers are transparent to non-data colors. That is, with the top layer the light can either go through or be blocked (1 bit), but the second layer can only be reached when the first layer allows the light through, so two layers could seemingly only hold 3 bits, not 4 as the article claims, and the progression would be linear rather than to a power of two, as it also claimed. What am I missing, here?

Fact meets Fiction again

[PatOBan]

Didn't they use something like this for storage in the first Star Trek? I seem to recall they different colours!

Opticom

[jabbadabbadoo]

A norwegian company (I think) has joined forces with Intel to provide polymer storage within the decade. Exiting stuff: Opticom

Re:Are you trying to be dense?

[ItMustBeEsoteric]

What I'm saying is not at all that I don't want to hear about new technology; even if it doesn't have the damndest bit of a place in my life at the moment or even possibly in my lifetime.

What I AM saying is that I don't care to hear things being touted as replacements to things which they obviously are NOT. At least not yet. Does the article tout this so? Not necessarily. Will some /.-ers? Yes.

You're talking to someone who's going into pharmaceutical research--I damned well know the difference. It's like the Venturi effect you seemed to feel the need to point out to mae your arguement sound smarter--sure it had meaning before commercial airlines, but it didn't mean a damned thing to the non-science interested consumer. And that's what my point was. To me AS A CONSUMER this is pretty worthless right now. That's all.

Is this optimal?

[Muad'Dave]

I'm certainly no chemist, but why would one choose to use a spherical structure that suffers from poor packing density? Similarly, why would you layer the distinct dye-bearing materials instead of coming up with a solution containing all of the dyes at once and depositing them in a solid block (or at least as a packing of cubes)? Instead of having discrete onion-shaped 'bits', you could have as many bits as your read/write mechanisms could handle, and each dye's contribution would be read from exactly the same spot in the matrix.