What if we could use a 4 meter telescope to extract the visual information obtainable with a 40 meter one? What if we could observe rotating black holes thus confirming one of Einstein’s most intriguing predictions? And what if the same novel physical discovery allowed us to multiply twenty fold the information we can carry on a given frequency?

Sounds like sci-fi or an Hollywood movie? If we added that the author of all this is a 47 year old Venetian Astronomer with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics that, in spite of being one of the world’s most renowned experts in the field of quantum physics, is still in search of his first stable occupation in the Italian academia you would surely be inclined towards the Hollywood blockbuster.

Sometimes, however, life is stranger than fiction and we had proof of this during the compelling lecture Fabrizio Tamburini gave yesterday in Venice Telecom Italia Future Centre. He announced that by the end of June an experiment like the seminal one of Marconi will take place in Venice in order to prove his theory; a transmitter will be placed at San Marco while the receiving station will be placed on the facing island of San Giorgio. For a given frequency three channels of information will be transmitted: if they will be received without interfering one with the other the theorised breakthrough in the telecommunications world will be reality.

But what’s the physical discovery that could allow this breakthrough? Details are quite involved (interested parties may find them here and here); the theory stems from some Majorana works of the 30′s. Its essence is nonetheless clear: electromagnetic radiations (in the following we’ll refer for clarity sake to light, a subset of them) possess characteristics we’re already familiar with. They possess a frequency (which accounts for an em radiations to be light instead of an x-ray or a radio wave and accounts for the perceived colour of light), an amplitude (is the light we perceive dim or strong?) and a polarization (which is the characteristic of light used to allow 3D projections and also used in sunglasses and photographic filters to eliminate scattered light).

Tamburini theorised and observed a supplementary propriety: vorticity. By observing the vorticity of the light received from a telescope we’re able to extract more information from it thus overtaking current diffraction limits and obtaining what once was feasible only with a telescope 10 times as big. Rotating black holes give light curved by the a vorticity that allow us to observe them.

And last but not least, by emitting electromagnetic radiations with a given vorticity and by being able to discriminate between em radiations differing only in their vorticity we’re effectively adding a new dimension to electromagnetic transmissions, multiplying the quantity of information we’re able to transmit for a given frequency!

So stay tuned on this blog: we’ll be keen to report on the actual experiment and give you further details on Tamburini’s activities.

In a foreseeable future we might accidentally wipe our video collection or our photographic history because we forgot to feed the memory that contained them!

Since Watson and Crick discovery of DNA with its double helix structure and four nucleobases alphabet we’ve been fascinated by this way of encoding information. In recent times several laboratories undertook efforts to use this biological instrument for scopes other than supporting life. Biostorage, the idea of storing any kind of information in living organisms is quite a new field: the first attempts in this direction are just 10 years old.

In 2007 short sequences of text were successfully encoded in bacteria by a team of Keio University in Tokyo¹. Now a team from CUHK, the Chinese University in Honk Kong, managed to store more complex data (like video) in E. coli bacteria. They did so by developing a method of compressing data, splitting it into chunks and distributing it between different bacterial cells, which helps to overcome limits on storage capacity. They are also able to “map” the DNA so information can be easily located². Information density reachable by this approach is astonishing: researchers say that one gram of bacteria could store the same amount of information as 450 2 Terabyte hard disks.

Just imagine how much traditional archives would shrink if stored on such a media: national archives shelving of developed countries usually expands for hundreds of kilometers but would fit on a few petri dishes stored in a refrigerator!

Besides that, as bacteria reproduce this would mean that this information could be preserved as long as we keep these organisms alive.

We’re obviously far away from being able to use this marvelous storage media outside of a biology laboratory, but the road is being paved for the moment where an accidental drop of penicillin could wreak havoc into your hard drive

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¹Yachie, N., Sekiyama, K., Sugahara, J., Ohashi, Y. and Tomita, M. (2007), Alignment-Based Approach for Durable Data Storage into Living Organisms. Biotechnology Progress, 23: 501–505. doi: 10.1021/bp060261y

²Lou S, Ni B, Lo LY, Tsui SK, Chan TF, and Leung KS: ABMapper: a suffix array-based tool for multi-location searching and splice-junction mapping. Bioinformatics. 2010

²Lou S, Li JW, Qin H, Yim AK, Lo LY, Ni B, Leung KS, Tsui SK, and Chan TF: Detection of splicing events and multiread locations from RNA-seq data based on a geometric-tail (GT) distribution of intron length.
BMC Bioinformatics. 2010