Chemical "Infofuses" Communicate Without Electricity

Al writes "Researchers at Harvard and Tufts University have developed a way to send coded messages without using electricity. David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts, and Harvard's George Whitesides have developed 'infofuses' that can transmit information simply by burning. The fuses — metallic salts depositing on a nitrocellulose strand — emit pulses of infrared and visible light of different colors whose sequence encodes information. They were developed in response to a call from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for technologies to allow soldiers stranded without a power source to communicate. In the first demonstration of the idea, they used the infofuses to transmit the message look mom no electricity." Currently the researchers are "trying to figure out a way to dynamically encode a message on the fly in the field without specialized equipment."

Comments

Re:Chicken eggs

[Locke2005]

I see several flaws with this scenario: 1) Chicken's can't fly. 2) Even homing pigeons can't return to somewhere they've never been before, and 3) the hatched chicks would be dinner for someone long before they matured to the point where they could carry a message. I've got a much better scheme: Use 2 parabolic acoustical reflectors pointed directly at each other. One person speaks at the focal point of one reflector, while the other listens at the focal point of the other. Works for 2 way communication. Only potential problem: It may require a laser to line up the reflectors.