A group of experts at the Tufts University announce the creation of a form of invisible ink. The method relies on the use of patterned bacteria cultures, which only glow under very specific conditions. The message is inscribed in the patterns in which the microorganisms have been grown on the medium.
On the surface, the message may look as an ordinary sheet of paper. But its surface is filled with bacterial colonies, arranged specifically in a specific patterns that can be made into texts or images.
When analyzed with conventional methods, the message remains hidden. Once it completes its route, people at the other end of the line analyze the paper with a special set of instruments, which illuminate the transport medium with a narrow set of light types.
This makes the invisible ink visible again, so that the message can be relayed. Scientists already imagine advanced uses for the system, such as for example forgery-resistant bacterial barcodes and watermarks that may not be duplicated with access to advanced technologies.
The new system, designated InfoBiology by its creators, delivers individual messages called Steganography by Printed Arrays of Microbes, or SPAM. It was developed by Tufts University chemists David Walt and Manuel Palacios, Wired reports.
“Obviously, the secret agent kind of application jumps out. Somebody embedded in an environment where they need to get a message out but don’t want to be caught,” Walt explains. His earlier work on conveying information through unorthodox mediums laid the groundwork for InforBiology.
Details of how the system works were published in the September 26 issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “We were sitting around the lab, thinking how we could do the same thing with biology,” Walt says.
“We were familiar with work done earlier, where people put codes in DNA. You can synthesize DNA in codes where letters correspond to different combinations of bases, then sequence it out and read the code. But that requires some pretty sophisticated instrumentation,” he goes on to say.
“We thought about doing this with a real simple readout: color. That’s when the idea of using fluorescent proteins came up,” the expert adds. Fluorescent proteins can be detected with ultraviolet light, and are only produced when a specific gene is turned on.
The Tufts group now plans to continue their research forward. Over time, their method could be significantly improved, helping users put even more information on a single sheet of paper.
http://news.softpedia.com
On the surface, the message may look as an ordinary sheet of paper. But its surface is filled with bacterial colonies, arranged specifically in a specific patterns that can be made into texts or images.
When analyzed with conventional methods, the message remains hidden. Once it completes its route, people at the other end of the line analyze the paper with a special set of instruments, which illuminate the transport medium with a narrow set of light types.
This makes the invisible ink visible again, so that the message can be relayed. Scientists already imagine advanced uses for the system, such as for example forgery-resistant bacterial barcodes and watermarks that may not be duplicated with access to advanced technologies.
The new system, designated InfoBiology by its creators, delivers individual messages called Steganography by Printed Arrays of Microbes, or SPAM. It was developed by Tufts University chemists David Walt and Manuel Palacios, Wired reports.
“Obviously, the secret agent kind of application jumps out. Somebody embedded in an environment where they need to get a message out but don’t want to be caught,” Walt explains. His earlier work on conveying information through unorthodox mediums laid the groundwork for InforBiology.
Details of how the system works were published in the September 26 issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “We were sitting around the lab, thinking how we could do the same thing with biology,” Walt says.
“We were familiar with work done earlier, where people put codes in DNA. You can synthesize DNA in codes where letters correspond to different combinations of bases, then sequence it out and read the code. But that requires some pretty sophisticated instrumentation,” he goes on to say.
“We thought about doing this with a real simple readout: color. That’s when the idea of using fluorescent proteins came up,” the expert adds. Fluorescent proteins can be detected with ultraviolet light, and are only produced when a specific gene is turned on.
The Tufts group now plans to continue their research forward. Over time, their method could be significantly improved, helping users put even more information on a single sheet of paper.
http://news.softpedia.com
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