Looks like the electronic engineers of the future are going to have to master organic chemistry as well – hope they teach it better than they did in our day: researchers at Syracuse University report that they have optically stored and retrieved optical data in three dimensions from a block of molecules of a protein isolated from a bacterium found in salt marshes called bacteriorhodapsin, which converts light into chemical and electrical signals fast and efficiently – the molecule changes its shape in a flip-flop manner when hit with a laser beam, and can capture two photons simultaneously to create three-dimensional memory that could handle applications such as comparing different images to look for a match in vision systems; work elsewhere, reports the Wall Street Journal, has genetic engineered the protein to produce a mutation that is five times more sensitive to light than is the natural protein.
