A new wave

BEFORE 1948, the world was analogue. Then Claude Shannon, a mathematician at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey who was famous for unicycling around the corridors of that august institution, realised that words, pictures and sounds could be represented and transmitted using streams of ones and zeros. The conversion of analogue to digital was the start of the information revolution, and Shannon's way of doing it—a technique known as uniform sampling—has not changed much since then.

Until now. Akram Aldroubi, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Karlheinz Gröchenig, of the University of Connecticut, have described a new way of sampling analogue signals that could overcome many limitations of Shannon's method. Although this technique may have only a small effect on everyday applications, such as the recording of music, it could revolutionise fields such as body-scanning that need to process information by the bucketful.