Invisible ink could be a thing of the past. Tomorrow’s secret codes may instead be hidden in dots of flammable metals. Burning what researchers are calling infofuses releases an encrypted, readable message, representing a new way chemical reactions can be harnessed to store and transmit information, suggests a study appearing online May 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Novelty comes from fresh combinations of old pieces of information,” comments Ehud Keinan of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “This is what we have here: old phenomenon that can be used in a new way.”