Sunday, November 27, 2005

Shrinking storage mediums...

Apparently nature had cracked the technique for storing large amounts of data in a very small structure : DNA. An interesting article in Forbes about DNA computers and DNA storage.

Here is an interesting excerpt...
The first working computer made entirely of DNA was created in 1994 by Leonard Adleman, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California. In a teaspoon of water, he used a series of biochemical reactions to solve the famous “traveling salesman” problem (basically, how many ways can you get from New York to Cleveland while stopping in seven other cities in between?). The promise of the approach was that because each piece of DNA can function essentially as its own computer, it might be possible to use it to do as many as a quadrillion computations at once.

No comments: