Extra-Ordinary

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I decided to pick up a copy of New Scientist from the shop this morning, as the main strap-line was 'Eradicating Dementia', which to one of my advancing years has to be a topic of interest. However the first articles I dipped into threatened to tip me into a state of mental discombobulation anyway, given the nature of their content. First off the bat, a DNA-based computer that has been programmed to solve simple chess and sudoku problems, by Albert Keung and colleagues at North Carolina State University recently. Now, weird as it seems, DNA computing, although still in its infancy, is not a new thing. But what is remarkable about these developments - despite the triviality of their current level of problem-solving: it's still proof-of-concept time, after all - is the sheer, mind-boggling storage data-density of this type of technology [bio-technology?]. 10,000 terabytes of data per cubic centimetre. Ten sodding petabytes. That's approximately 5000 billion pages of printed text. Which is an unimaginably large amount of data. In a one centimetre by one centimetre cube of space: about a quarter of a decent sugar cube. Bloody hell. Oh, and by the way, this stuff could have some serious longevity. Stored at refrigerator - four Celsius - temperatures, it will potentially be viable for 6000 years. I was going to mention the other two pieces in the issue that were frankly also as mind-boggling, but I'm boggled enough for one day: more tomorrow... [the above picture is for illustrative purposes only: if you want the full skinny on this story, go to doi.org/nds3]

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