Inspired by the loss of their mother, they have poured millions into studying a key protein behind frontotemporal dementia. But all has not gone according to plan
IRVINE, Calif., March 5, 2026 — Terran Orbital, a Lockheed Martin Company and a leading satellite solutions provider, announced today the appointment of Kwon Park as senior director of manufacturing […]
SAN FRANCISCO – Southern California startup General Galactic plans to launch a 500-kilogram satellite later this year to demonstrate a novel multimode propulsion system. When the Trinity mission travels to low-Earth orbit on the SpaceX Transporter-18 rideshare, no earlier than October, General Galactic will test its Genesis platform, which pairs chemical and electric engines. “We’re […]
LONDON – In-orbit services provider Infinite Orbits announced plans March 3 to acquireLondon-based in-orbit servicing and manufacturing startup Lunasa, marking a step in the company’s expansion into the United Kingdom. The acquisition, the value of which the companies didn’t disclose, will bring together the Infinite Orbits’ and Lunasa’s investments into complementary spacecraft rendezvous and life […]
Learn how advanced scanning and 3D reconstruction revealed the face of the Little Foot fossil and new insights into Australopithecus and early human evolution in Africa.
Humans are generating more data than ever before. While much of these data do not need to be stored long-term, some – such as scientific and historical records – would ideally still be retrievable in decades, or even centuries. The problem is that modern digital archive systems such as hard disk drives do not last that long. This means that data must regularly be transferred to new media, which is costly and time-consuming.
A team at Microsoft Research now claims to have found a solution. By using ultrashort, intense laser pulses to “write” data units called phase voxels into glass chips, the team says it has created a medium that could store 4.8 terabytes (TB) of data error-free for more than 10::000 years – a span that exceeds the age of history’s oldest surviving written records.
Direct laser writing
The idea of writing data into glass or other durable media with lasers is not new. Direct laser writing, as it is known, involves focusing high-power pulses, usually just femtoseconds (10-15 s) long, on a three-dimensional region within a medium. This modifies the medium’s optical properties in that region, and each modified region becomes a data-storage unit known as a voxel, which is the 3D equivalent of a pixel.
Because the laser’s energy is focused on a very small volume, the voxels created with this method can be very densely packed. Changing the amplitude and polarization of the laser’s output changes what information gets encoded at each voxel, and an optical microscope can “read out” this information by picking up changes in the light as it passes through each modified region. In terms of the media used, glass is particularly promising because it is thermally and chemically stable and is robust to moisture and electromagnetic interference.
Direct laser writing does have some limitations, however. In particular, encoding information generally requires multiple laser pulses per voxel, restricting the technique’s throughput and efficiency.
Two types of voxel, one laser pulse
Microsoft Research’s “Project Silica” team says it overcame this problem by encoding information in two types of voxel: phase voxels and birefringent voxels. Both types involve modifying the refractive index of the medium, and thus the speed of light within it. The difference is that whereas phase voxels create an isotropic change in the refractive index, birefringent voxels create an anisotropic change by rotating the voxel in the plane of the 120-mm square, 2-mm-thick glass chip.
Crucially, both types of voxel can be produced using a single laser pulse. According to Project Silica team leader Richard Black, this makes the modified region smaller and more uniform, minimizing effects such as light scattering that can interfere with read-outs from neighbouring voxels. It also allows many voxel layers to be written into, and then read out from, a single glass chip. The result is a system that can generate up to 10 million voxels per second, which equates to 25.6 million bits of data per second (Mbit s−1).
Performance of different types of glass
The Microsoft researchers studied two types of glass, both of which have better mechanical properties than ordinary window glass. In 301 layers of fused silica glass, they achieved a data density of 1.59 Gbit mm−3 using birefringent voxels, with a write throughput of 25.6 Mbit s−1 and a write efficiency of 10.1 nJ per bit. In 258 layers of borosilicate glass, the data density reached 0.678 Gbit mm−3 using phase voxels. Here, the write throughput was 18.4 Mbit s−1 and the write efficiency 8.85 nJ per bit.
“The phase voxel discovery in particular is quite notable because it lets us store data in ordinary borosilicate glass, rather than pure fused silica; do it with a single laser pulse per voxel; and do it highly parallel in close proximity,” says Black. “That combination of cheaper material and much simpler and faster writing and reading was a genuinely exciting moment for us.”
The researchers also showed that they could directly inscribe the glass using four independent laser beams in parallel, further increasing the write speeds for both types of glass.
Surviving “benign neglect”
To determine how long these inscribed glass plates could store data, the team repeatedly heated them to 500 °C, simulating their long-term ageing at lower temperatures. The results of these experiments suggest that encoded data could be retrieved after 10::000 years of storage at 290 °C. However, Black acknowledges that this figure does not account for external effects such as mechanical stress or chemical corrosion that could degrade the glass and the data it stores. Another unaddressed challenge is that storage capacity and writing speed will both need to grow before the technology can compete with today’s data centres.
If these deficiencies can be remedied, Black thinks the clearest potential applications would be in national libraries and other facilities that store scientific data and cultural records. “It’s also compelling for cloud archives where data is written once and kept indefinitely,” Black says. He points out that the team has already demonstrated proofs of concept with Warner Bros., the Global Music Vault and the Golden Record 2.0 project, a “cultural time capsule” inspired by the literal golden records launched on the Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s.
A common factor across all these organizations, Black explains, is that they need media that can survive “benign neglect” – something he says Project Silica delivers. He adds that the project also provides what he calls operational proportionality, meaning that its costs are primarily a function of the operations performed on the data, not the length of time the data are kept. “This completely alters the way we think about keeping archival material,” he says. “Once you have paid to keep the data, there is little point in deleting it, and you might as well keep it.”
Microsoft began exploring direct laser data storage in glass nearly a decade ago thanks to team member Ant Rowstron, who recognized the potential of work being done by physicist Peter Kazansky and colleagues at the University of Southampton, UK. The latest version of the technique, which is detailed in Nature, grew out of that collaboration, and Black says its capabilities are limited only by the power and speed of the femtosecond laser being used. “We have now concluded our research study and are sharing our results so that others may build on our work,” he says.
In this episode of Space Minds, Jeff Foust moderates a panel at AIAA AscendxTexas on the role Texas is playing in the space economy. With a series of industry leaders they […]
For decades, space has served as humanity’s most demanding testing laboratory, where only the most resilient technologies survive the vacuum, radiation and temperature extremes beyond Earth’s protective embrace. Today, we stand at an inflection point where artificial intelligence is poised to fundamentally transform how we explore, understand and operate in space. But making AI-powered space […]
LONDON – The United Kingdom is refocusing its funding priorities with a new 500 million pound ($668 million) space funding package that aligns more closely with economic growth and national security priorities, Liz Lloyd, the UK minister for the Digital Economy at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said March 4. Speaking here at […]
“Surround sound for biological cells,” is how Luke Cox describes the ultrasound technology that Impulsonics has developed to solve the “unsticking problem” in biomedical science. Cox is co-founder and chief executive of UK-based Impulsonics, which spun-out of the University of Bristol in 2023.
He is also my guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast. He explains why living cells tend to stick together and why this can be a barrier to scientific research and the development of new medical treatments.
The system uses an array of ultrasound transducers to focus sound so that it frees-up and manipulates cells in a way that does not alter their biological properties. This is unlike chemical unsticking processes, which can change cells and impact research results.
We also chat about Cox’s career arc from PhD student to chief executive and explore opportunities for physicists in the biomedical industry.
The following articles are mentioned in the podcast:
An analysis of more than 5.2 million papers in 5000 different journals has revealed a dramatic rise in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in academic writing across all scientific disciplines, especially physics.
However, the analysis has revealed a big gap between the number of researchers who use AI and those who admit to doing so – even though most scientific journals have policies requiring the use of AI to be disclosed.
Carried out by data scientist Yi Bu from Peking University and colleagues, the analysis looks at papers that are listed in the OpenAlex dataset and were published between 2021 and 2025.
To assess the impact of editorial guidelines introduced in response to the growing use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, they examined journal AI-writing policies, looked at author disclosures and used AI to see if papers had been written with the help of technology.
The AI detection analysis reveals that the use of AI writing tools has increased dramatically across all scientific disciplines since 2023. It also finds that 70% of journals have adopted AI policies, which primarily require authors to disclose the use of AI-writing tools.
IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World, for example, has a journals policy that supports authors who use AI in a “responsible and appropriate” manner. It encourages authors, however, to be “transparent about their use of any generative AI tools in either the research or the drafting of the manuscript”.
A new framework
But in the new study, a full-text analysis of 75 000 papers published since 2023, reveals that only 76 articles (about 0.1% of the total) explicitly disclosed the use of AI writing tools.
In addition, the study finds no significant difference in the use of AI between journals that have disclosure policies and those that do not, which suggests that disclosure requirements are being ignored – what the authors call a “transparency gap”.
The study also finds that researchers from non-English-speaking countries are more likely to rely on AI writing tools than native English speakers. Increases in the use of AI writing tools are found to be particularly rapid in journals with high levels of open-access publishing.
The authors now call for a re-evaluation of ethical frameworks to foster responsible AI integration in science. They state that prohibition or disclosure requirements are insufficient to regulate AI use, with their results showing that researchers are not complying with policies.
The authors argue that instead of “opposition and resistance”, “proactive engagement and institutional innovation” is needed “to ensure AI technology truly enhances the value of science”.
When Jared Isaacman was sworn in as NASA administrator Dec. 18, he hit the ground running — or, perhaps more accurately, hit the air flying. At a town hall the next day, he said he would visit all the agency’s field centers, a task he completed by late January. In some cases he showed up […]
The third launch of a small launch vehicle developed by a Japanese company failed shortly after liftoff March 4, raising questions about the rocket’s future.
The Senate Commerce Committee advanced a revised NASA authorization bill that implements some of the changes to Artemis sought by the agency while also extending the life of the ISS
Canadian telco Telus has agreed to take a stake in AST SpaceMobile and invest in ground infrastructure needed to connect subscribers to the operator’s planned direct-to-smartphone constellation.
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