It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single researcher in possession of a good finding, must be in want of a way to publicize it. So why not use a good Jane Austen quote?
Not the one above, shamelessly tweaked from Pride & Prejudice, but instead a group from the University of Texas at Austin (of course) turned to a lesser-known work, Mansfield Park, to show off how it could embed information in a polymer.
The molecular data-storage technique from UT encoded the quote by using polymers called oligourethanes, which researchers said are "highly accessible and encode information with greater density than DNA-based approaches, which rely on nucleic acids."
"This work is another step toward the long-term goal of using synthetic, sequence-defined polymers for information storage," Eric Anslyn, a chemistry professor and author of the study, said in a news release from the university. "It sets the stage and hopefully inspires further work towards the practical use of molecules to usefully store information."
The Mansfield Park quote was chosen by the team as being "uplifting" without requiring someone to know the entire book, researchers said.
The quote? "If one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: We find comfort somewhere."