Putting noise to work

Noise is often undesirable--for example, in a recorded conversation in a noisy room, in astronomical observations with large background signals, or in image processing. A research team from China, Spain and Germany has demonstrated that noise can induce spatial and temporal order in nonlinear systems. This effect may be used in the future to identify signals that are hidden in a large amount of noise. Inversely, signals may be embedded in a noisy background and thereby be ciphered in order to re...