Chemical Infofuses Communicate Without Electricity

Al writes: "Researchers at Harvard and Tufts University have developed a way to encode messages without using electricity. David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts and Harvard's George Whitesides developed "infofuses" that can transmit information simply by burning. The fuses--metallic salts depositing on a nitrocellulose strand--emit pulses of infrared and visible light of different colors whose sequence encodes information. They were developed in response to a call from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for technologies to allow soldiers stranded without a power source to communicate. In the first demonstration of the idea, they used the infofuses to transmit the message "LOOK MOM NO ELECTRICITY.""