silica glass tagged posts

Thousands of years from now, what will remain of our digital era? The ever-growing vastness of human knowledge is no longer stored in libraries, but on hard drives that struggle to last decades, let alone millennia.

However, information written into glass by lasers could allow data to be preserved for more than 10,000 years, Microsoft announced in a study on Wednesday.

Since 2019, Microsoft’s Silica project has been trying to encode data on glass plates, in a throwback to the early days of photography, when negatives were also stored on glass.

The system uses silica glass, a common material that is resistant to changes in temperature, moisture and electromagnetic int...

Rapid, accurate communication worldwide is possible via fiber optic cables, but as good as they are, they are not perfect. Now, researchers from Penn State and AGC Inc. in Japan suggest that the silica glass used for these cables would have less signal loss if it were manufactured under high pressure.

“Signal loss means that we have to use amplifiers every 80 to 100 kilometers (50 to 62 miles),” said John C. Mauro, professor of materials science and engineering, Penn State. “After that distance, the signal wouldn’t be detected properly. Across continents or across oceans that becomes a big deal.”

Glass fibers lose signal strength because of Rayleigh scattering — scattering of light that comes from fluctuations in the glass’s atomic structure.

“Glass, on an atomic scale, is he...