api
language

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

 

Japanese use bacteria to store data

‘These days, data get stored on disks, computer chips, hard drives and good old-fashioned paper.

Scientists in Japan see something far smaller but more durable – bacteria.

The four characters – T, C, A and G – that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much like digital data.

Character combinations can stand for specific letters and symbols – so codes in genomes can be translated, or read, to produce music, text, video and other content.

While ink may fade and computers may crash, bacterial information lasts as long as a species stays alive – possibly a mind-boggling million years – according to Professor Masaru Tomita, who heads the team of researchers at Keio University.’




Leave a Reply

home