Friday, March 23, 2007

Data-storing bacteria

In keeping with the ecological theme established by the bee swarm search entry I thought I would put this here as well:

A Japanese university announced scientists there have developed a new technology
that uses bacteria DNA as a medium for storing data long-term, even for
thousands of years. Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio
University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new
technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100
bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire.The
universities said they successfully encoded "e= mc2 1905!" -- Einstein's theory
of relativity and the year he enunciated it -- on the common soil bacteria,
Bacillius subtilis.


I wonder how we are going to download information from a bacteria?

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