Chemical ‘waves’ used to encode words as Morse code

Chemical ‘waves ’ can be used to encode information in a similar way to radio waves. The team behind the work, led by Stephen Fletcher from the University of Oxford, developed a controllable reaction network capable of sustained oscillations and then used it to tune the shapes of chemical waves for data transduction.¹ ‘We achieved this by measuring waves of chemical concentration and seeing how different input parameters give different repeating waveforms,’ explains first author Michael Howlett. The researchers believe that their new concept could one day be part of technology that is integrated with biological systems and could be included in sensors and other devices.