Tag: information
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What is an individual?
It's almost impossible to imagine biology without individuals -- individual organisms, individual cells, and individual genes, for example. But what about a worker ant that never reproduces, and could never survive apart from the colony? Are the trillions of microorganisms in our microbiomes, which vastly outnumber our human cells, part of our individuality? The authors…
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Information for… ever. Against knowledge.
As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud will eventually run out of space, can't thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet,…
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Quantum memories…
Quantum cryptography today uses optical fiber over several hundred kilometers and is marked by its high degree of security: it is impossible to copy or intercept information without making it disappear. However, the fact that it is impossible to copy the signal also prevents scientists from amplifying it to diffuse it over long distances, as…
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Light. Data. Universe.
The internet is often called the “World Wide Web,” but it’s not actually accessible to residents of a large portion of the world. Today, four billion people are offline, and 1.6 billion of them live in sparsely populated areas around the world. In recent years, a race to solve that problem has emerged among big…
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Information. Decay. Entropy. Clues…
Information may seem ethereal, given how easily we forget phone numbers and birthdays. But scientists say it is physical, and if a new study is correct, that goes for quantum systems, too. Although pages of text or strings of bits seem easily erased with the press of a button, the act of destroying information has…
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