Not your grandpa’s smoke signals

A fuse dotted with chemicals offers a new way to code messages

Invisible ink could be a thing of the past. Tomorrow’s secret codes may instead be hidden in dots of flammable metals. Burning what researchers are calling infofuses releases an encrypted, readable message, representing a new way chemical reactions can be harnessed to store and transmit information, suggests a study appearing online May 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.