> Zapped with controlled electrical jolts from a potentiostat—a shoebox-size lab instrument costing only around US $10,000, compared to several hundred thousand dollars for a high-end analytical mass spectrometer—the different ferrocenes lit up at their characteristic voltages, generating a distinct signal for each step in the chain.
> In the study, the process of degradation, sampling, and electrochemical analysis of each 11-character polymer strand took around 2.5 hours. According to Anslyn, his team has since optimized the protocol to “make it faster”—but speed isn’t really the point of chemical data memory, when compared to today’s instant digital storage technologies.
Nobody will be storing passwords with this until it's immediate and almost free.
theandrewbailey•6h ago
> In the study, the process of degradation, sampling, and electrochemical analysis of each 11-character polymer strand took around 2.5 hours. According to Anslyn, his team has since optimized the protocol to “make it faster”—but speed isn’t really the point of chemical data memory, when compared to today’s instant digital storage technologies.
Nobody will be storing passwords with this until it's immediate and almost free.