Studying with the radio on may not be the best way to remember what you’ve read. But scientists have now built a data storage device whose memory gets a boost from noise.
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The device can store one bit of information, such as a 0 or a 1, only when surrounded by electronic noise, which is normally a problem in computer circuits. The experiment was published November 4 on ArXiv.org.
“The whole thing works very well with some amount of noise,” says Diego Grosz of the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, a coauthor of the study. “If you remove the noise, it doesn’t store the bit at all.”