Squishy Rubik’s Cube made from polymers holds promise for data storage

A team of chemists from the US and China have constructed a cube of coloured hydrogel blocks, that can inspire new ways to store and detect information, and possibly even help patients monitors their medical conditions.

Just like a Rubik’s Cube, the structure contains rotatable individual rows and columns, and manipulating these changes the colour pattern of the cube’s faces.

But unlike the rigid plastic of a Rubik’s Cube, this new structure is made from a self-healing hydrogel, a polymer material that can absorb large amounts of water and form new chemical bonds when old bonds break.

The team came up with the structure as part of a larger effort to find new ways to encode information into physical objects.

Jonathan Sessler, Professor of Chemistry at The University of Texas, said: “Think of QR codes, which are patterns of black and white pixels on a two-dimensional surface used to store information. We’re exploring ways to encode information in patterns of colour and in three dimensions, theoretically leading to a much higher information density.”

Mathematicians estimate there are roughly 43 quintillion unique combinations of a Rubik’s Cube, suggesting that one cube could store a vast amount of information.

Sessler said: “Over a short time, you can manipulate the interactions between the little blocks. It’s sticky, but they aren’t getting stuck. Then over a longer time, say 24 hours, the structure locks into place.”

“We can solve problems in seconds by using chemistry to cheat.”