  It is often assumed that the ancilla qubits required for encoding a qubit in
quantum error correction (QEC) have to be in pure states, $|00...0>$ for
example. In this letter, we seek an encoding scheme, in which the ancillae may
be in a uniformly mixed state. We demonstrate our scheme experimentally by
making use of a three-qubit NMR quantum computer. Moreover, the encoded state
has an interesting nature in terms of Quantum Discord, or purely quantum
correlations between the data-qubit and ancillae.
