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- Molecular Fingerprints That Rewrite the Code of Security
Molecular Fingerprints That Rewrite the Code of Security
A breakthrough hydrogel material could make digital cloning obsolete
Devona Green Jordan
October 21, 2025
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🧬Interesting Tech Fact:
Before digital encryption became mainstream, in the 1980s, engineers at Bell Labs experimented with embedding microscopic glass microspheres into product coatings as physical identity markers — an obscure precursor to today’s security tags. Each microsphere mixture had a unique refractive pattern that could be authenticated using laser light, making it one of the first attempts to create physically unclonable identifiers long before the term existed. Though the idea was largely forgotten amid the rise of software-based cryptography, it laid the groundwork for material-based authentication, inspiring modern innovations like hydrogel molecular fingerprints that secure information not with code, but with the inherent randomness of physical matter itself.
