Kitchen sponges can be used as memory devices | Hacker News Reader

Kitchen sponges can be used as memory devices

nature.com

53 pointsharhargange27 comments

The idea of mechanical memory systems reminds me of a short story by Ted Chiang, “Exhalation”

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

That was a really nice read; thanks for the link.

If you haven't read it, Stories of Your Life and Others by Chiang is incredible.

here's what I think it says: you know those Pin Art toys where you can press your face against all the metal pins and it will show an image of your face, till you shake it up? Well you can do that with a compressed sponge too, and it will reset when you take the pressure off the sponge.

how far off am I?

You're not far off and from this perspective of course anything can hold information.

- The State is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

- What truth?

- The Monad

But in all seriousness, I think the research matters because they aren't just concerned with what can hold information, but also suggest looking at what does hold information that is actually used for some biological purpose.

Attach two probes to the opposite sides of the sponge.

Wet the sponge to store 1. Get the water out to store 0.

Did you know you can use coins as memory? Stack them together to remember numbers.

Big silicon hates this one trick.

    Indenting with a metallic indentor gives a quite distinct
    response in both of these phases. In the elastic phase, the sponge
    regains its original shape following unindentation over a timescale
    t given by the relaxation timescale of the visco-elastic polymeric
    material. For the polymeric materials used, the relaxation time-
    scales are of the order of 100 s and the material recovers fully
    leaving no trace of damage. In contrast, the pseudo-plastic phase
    retains a permanent deformation as the relaxation timescale
    effectively goes to infinite due to frictional locking. This deforma-
    tion memory can be erased by removing the external strain field
    allowing the pseudo-plastic zone to transit back into the elastic
    zone through the removal of applied global stress on the sponge.

To take the analogy further, you have to squeeze the metal pins together first so that they rub together and the friction prevents them from all just falling back into their original position after a minute or two once you remove your face from the pins. Instead of shaking it up you stop squeezing the rods together and eventually they all fall back into their original position. Someone with an actual materials science background can take it to the next step.

this is a really good TLDR but if this what it actually means then by that means, i should be able to store information on a aluminum foil aswell?

> We present emergent behaviour of storing mechanical deformation in compressed soft cellular materials (a network of soft polymeric rods).

I don't believe aluminium foil is cellular or polymeric in structure.

You can store information with basically any object.

You can count in binary using your fingers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You could use pine needles to count.

You could do steganography in knitting.

You could encode information in the dust collecting behind your tv furniture...

Totally agree. Mechanical Memory is everywhere. I don't intend to show this paper as a breakthrough, but the interesting thing here is that the memory stored is 'analog', 'scale independent' (Can be shrunk down), and also re-writable. This is not too different from a Compact Disc and we wrote this paper as we thought its an interesting observation. Besides this system is closer to biological systems than memory storing devices. I don't agree with the news article title as we don't present a working device. There are advantages with memory devices independent of 'electrons' as they can't be affected by electromagnetic fields which is why Discs are still in use for storing data across decades. 'Kitchen sponges can be used for storing memory' kinda would have been more accurate.

If you mean you can store information on aluminum foil because you can indent it, technically yes. I mean, that's how music was/is stored on wax phonograph cylinders and vynil records

Yes, you can also chisel information into cave walls in a similar fashion. The novelty here is that the indented information can be "erased" by uncompressing/unsqueezing/removing external stresses from the sponge (or other cellular material), but while it is in the compressed/stressed (pseudo-plastic) state it can hold on to the impressions almost indefinitely.

I tried reading the linked article but could not identify in layman the breakthrough

Link for the paper: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2024/sm/d4sm00099...

I understand that this link is authwalled (by accounts that can be created for free), but it's telling of the medium how the actual paper itself is downvoted while the majority of the rest of the comments appear to either be tangential/unrelated to the article, or stem from misunderstandings of the actual paper; RTFA still applies after all these years.

This is the Preprint no login required, I believe - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381997522_Emergent_...

The topic has no place on HN.

Or perhaps it shows HN wears no clothes. No one knows what it it, yet here it is on the front page. There is zero reason to think there is any higher meaning to HN if we work it out.

Is there any reason the think HN is better on topics they know or should know?

It could well be babble. To me it feels like a obfuscation of something well studied.

The author has worked on "rejuvenation of decontaminated N95 masks" which you can see how you might want to delete the memory. Not saying the topic is bad, but still think this paper is publish or perish.

So it has the same problem with a lot of "memory", reads are destructive. Your write probe and read probe are the same, some sort of needle/poker?

They need not be the same. CDs can be read with a laser and this can be read optically as well.

God I hope they don’t add AI, bitcoin or cyber security to my kitchen sponge. But I can hear the marketers thinking…

if they add all of it, then your kitchen sponge will become a sentient SpongeBob.

We need a smart sponge that can ping your phone when it needs to be replaced. Without this, we're in the dark ages.

AI hypers be like "kitchen sponges are conscious"

Can sponges be used as a capacitor for fluidics?

A lot of foamy materials are indeed used for that purpose

Interesting headline.

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