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DNA data storage writes digital files into synthetic DNA, using its four chemical letters, A, C, G and T, in place of a computer's 0s and 1s. A single gram could in theory hold about 215 million gigabytes, but writing and reading DNA is still far too slow and costly for everyday use.

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Computers store everything as 0s and 1s. DNA storage translates those into sequences of A, C, G and T, builds the matching strands chemically, and reads them back with the same sequencing machines used in genetics. In 2012 George Church's team at Harvard stored a whole book this way. In 2013 Nick Goldman and colleagues at the European Bioinformatics Institute stored all of Shakespeare's sonnets and an audio clip of Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. The 215 million gigabyte figure comes from DNA Fountain, a method published in 2017 by Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski. Kept cool and dry, DNA can last for thousands of years, which makes it attractive for archives, but in that study writing just two megabytes cost about 7,000 dollars.

Türkçe oku
Dijital dosyalar yapay DNA'ya da kaydedilebilir: Bilgisayarın 0'ları ve 1'leri, DNA'nın dört kimyasal harfine (A, C, G ve T) çevrilir. Kuramsal olarak tek bir gram DNA'ya yaklaşık 215 milyon gigabayt veri sığabilir; ama DNA'yı yazmak ve okumak günlük kullanım için hâlâ çok yavaş ve pahalıdır.

Bilgisayarlar her şeyi 0 ve 1 olarak saklar. DNA'ya veri yazmak için bu diziler A, C, G ve T harflerine çevrilir; karşılık gelen DNA zincirleri kimyasal yollarla üretilir ve genetik araştırmalarda kullanılan dizileme cihazlarıyla geri okunur. 2012'de Harvard'da George Church'ün ekibi bütün bir kitabı bu yöntemle sakladı. 2013'te Avrupa Biyoinformatik Enstitüsü'nden Nick Goldman ve arkadaşları, Shakespeare'in bütün sonelerini ve Martin Luther King'in “I Have a Dream” (Bir Hayalim Var) konuşmasından bir ses kaydını DNA'ya yazdı. 215 milyon gigabaytlık hesap, Yaniv Erlich ile Dina Zielinski'nin 2017'de yayımladığı DNA Fountain yöntemine dayanır. Serin ve kuru ortamda saklanan DNA binlerce yıl bozulmadan kalabildiği için arşivler açısından çekicidir. Ama aynı çalışmada yalnızca iki megabaytı yazmak yaklaşık 7.000 dolara mal olmuştu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: DNA digital data storage
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WonderHistory

When Neil Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” on 20 July 1969, his words reached Earth about 1.3 seconds later. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) away.

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Telomeres are stretches of repeated DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes, a little like the plastic tips on shoelaces. They get shorter as many of our cells divide, but their length cannot predict how long a particular person will live.

In the mid-1970s the Australian-born biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, working at Yale, found that chromosome ends carry a short DNA “word” repeated many times; in humans it is TTAGGG. She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for showing how telomeres, and an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds them, protect chromosomes. Each time most body cells divide, the copying machinery cannot quite reach the very end, so a little telomere is lost; when it gets too short, the cell stops dividing, which is why telomeres are often called a clock. But it is a poor clock for comparing people or species: mice have much longer telomeres than humans yet live only two or three years, and telomere length varies widely between people from birth. Many scientists therefore doubt commercial tests that claim to read your “biological age” from them.

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WonderTechnology

The atomic clocks on GPS satellites run about 38 millionths of a second a day faster than clocks on the ground, an effect predicted by Einstein's theories of relativity. Left uncorrected, the drift would put your position out by about 11 km within a single day.

A GPS receiver, such as the one in your phone, works out where it is by timing signals from several satellites orbiting about 20,200 km up. Radio signals travel about 300 metres in a microsecond, a millionth of a second, so even tiny clock errors matter. Relativity pulls the clocks apart in two ways. Special relativity says moving clocks run slow: travelling at almost 4 km a second, the satellite clocks lose about 7 microseconds a day. General relativity says clocks in weaker gravity run fast: high above Earth they gain about 46. The net gain is about 38 microseconds a day. So before launch, each satellite clock is set to run slightly slow, at 10.22999999543 million cycles a second instead of 10.23 million, and in orbit it keeps step with clocks on the ground.

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The Apollo Guidance Computer that steered astronauts to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of rewritable memory and 72 kilobytes of permanent memory. Its programs were woven by hand into “rope memory”: a wire threaded through a tiny magnetic ring stored a 1, and a wire passing it by stored a 0.

Designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and built by Raytheon, the computer was one of the first to use silicon chips (integrated circuits) and fitted into about 28 litres. Its memory was counted in “words” of 16 bits, or binary digits: 2,048 rewritable and 36,864 permanent. During Apollo 11's descent on 20 July 1969 it flashed 1202 and 1201 alarms: a radar left on in case the landing had to be abandoned was stealing processing time and overloading it. Its operating system, designed by J. Halcombe Laning, dropped less urgent jobs and restarted in a moment while the landing programs kept running, so Mission Control told the crew to carry on. The flight software was written by a team led by Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Its power was similar to that of the first home computers of the late 1970s.

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WonderTechnology

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The experiments were done at the University of California, Berkeley, in Clarke's group; Martinis was his doctoral student and Devoret a postdoctoral researcher. Absolute zero, −273.15 °C, is the lowest temperature possible. At the heart of the circuit was a Josephson junction: two superconductors, metals that carry current with no resistance when very cold, separated by an insulating layer only a few atoms thick. Vast numbers of electrons moved together as if they were one particle. The team saw two signs of quantum behaviour: the circuit escaped from a trapped state by tunnelling, slipping through an energy barrier it could not climb over, and it absorbed microwave energy only in fixed steps, or quanta, as an atom does. Circuits of this kind are now the qubits, the basic units of information, in the superconducting quantum computers built by companies such as Google and IBM.

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