“Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of five trillion bits per second in storage”*…
… and rising. Happily, technologists are keeping up:
The intricate arrangement of base pairs in our DNA encodes just about everything about us. Now, DNA contains the entirety of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as well.
A team of University of Texas Austin scientists just vastly improved the storage capacity of DNA and managed to encode the entire novel — translated into the geek-friendly language of Esperanto — in a double strand of DNA far more efficiently than has been done before. DNA storage isn’t new, but this work could help finally make it practical…
The full story at “Scientists Stored “The Wizard of Oz” on a Strand of DNA.” The UT release, here.
* George Dyson
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As we reconsider Kondo, we might send carefully-stowed birthday greetings to Jay Wright Forrester; he was born on this date in 1914. A pioneering computer engineer and systems scientist, he was one of the inventors of magnetic core memory, the predominant form of random-access computer memory during the most explosive years of digital computer development (between 1955 and 1975). It was part of a family of related technologies which bridged the gap between vacuum tubes and semiconductors by exploiting the magnetic properties of materials to perform switching and amplification.
And close to your correspondent’s heart, Forrester is also believed to have created the first animation in the history of computer graphics, a “jumping ball” on an oscilloscope.
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