Data

Data centers require heavy-duty cooling and maintenance. Microsoft has now finished a two-year test of an unconventional solution – dropping a data center to the bottom of the sea – and found that it was more reliable than land-based facilities.

A new internet speed record has been clocked at an incredible 178 terabits per second (Tb/s) – fast enough to download the entire Netflix library in under a second. It's achieved by modulating light in new ways before beaming it down optical fibers.

Information can be encoded into many patterns, such as ones and zeroes for computers. A new proof of concept has been demonstrated to encode information into artificial molecules, which could enable programmable materials or new types of computers.

Storing the world’s knowledge digitally online makes it vulnerable to being lost in a disaster. As a backup, GitHub has now archived 21 TB of public open source data and buried it in a vault in the Arctic in an effort to preserve it for 1,000 years.

A new type of data storage system could be denser, smaller, faster and more energy efficient than silicon chips. The new method involves encoding data in sliding stacks of two-dimensional layers of metals.

Just one gram of DNA can store 215 million GBs of data. Artificial DNA data storage systems could soon become more practical, thanks to a new technology named DORIS that can read and write files at room temperature without damaging the DNA.

Google has released a series of COVID-19 Community Mobility Maps, utilizing location history data from users around the world to present insights into how social distancing measures are changing the way people move around local communities.

Microsoft and Warner Bros. have crammed the 1978 movie Superman onto a silica glass slide the size of a drink coaster. This tough new medium is designed to last centuries, surviving punishment that would ruin film or magnetic drives.

A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, but this colorful mess is a new map of the Milky Way, showing strange star structures.

A newly published statement from the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has revealed inaccurate, intentionally manipulated data was included as part of a submission for a major new gene therapy that was approved for public use in May.

Researchers have developed a new method for transmitting data to smartphones – by embedding it in music. That means phones might one day receive Wi-Fi passwords or local information via tunes floating through the airwaves, with no perceptible change to the audio as far as the human ear can tell.