For the ones of you not knowing what
“Natto” is: Natto are fermented (fouling) soy beans, and
are quite favourite as food all over asia. In my opinion, it smells
horibble, so stay away.
The bacteria used to get the beans so sticky fouling is called
Bacillus subtilis and only rarely causes food poisoning.
Now back to storage devices…
…well that’s the news, – it – is the new storage devices, not the
Natto itself, but the DNA of the bacteria.Scientists (Natto lovers ?) from Keio University in Japan, of the
Institute for Advanced Biosciences, managed to “store” a short
message “E=mc^2 1905!” inside the genome of this bacillus subtilis.
Since DNA copying over generations and other environmental
influences, always leads to mutations (that’s evolution baby…),
the scientists decided NOT to use a cryptic and complex algorithm,
but instead used 4 different positions inside of the genome chain
to place the message information data multiple times. Thus
providing redundancy against damage and a possible error correction
when the message is read back from the DNA sequence.
Although this method already works quite well, there still is the
problem of the slow process (about 24 hours) of DNA construction
and sequence analysis, to actually write and read data.
But once these problems are solved, It might be that your harddisk
or DVD is not any longer your biggest data storage, instead you
could explore the billions of secret contents of your “Natto”
storage device.
“Natto” is: Natto are fermented (fouling) soy beans, and
are quite favourite as food all over asia. In my opinion, it smells
horibble, so stay away.
The bacteria used to get the beans so sticky fouling is called
Bacillus subtilis and only rarely causes food poisoning.
Now back to storage devices…
…well that’s the news, – it – is the new storage devices, not the
Natto itself, but the DNA of the bacteria.Scientists (Natto lovers ?) from Keio University in Japan, of the
Institute for Advanced Biosciences, managed to “store” a short
message “E=mc^2 1905!” inside the genome of this bacillus subtilis.
Since DNA copying over generations and other environmental
influences, always leads to mutations (that’s evolution baby…),
the scientists decided NOT to use a cryptic and complex algorithm,
but instead used 4 different positions inside of the genome chain
to place the message information data multiple times. Thus
providing redundancy against damage and a possible error correction
when the message is read back from the DNA sequence.
Although this method already works quite well, there still is the
problem of the slow process (about 24 hours) of DNA construction
and sequence analysis, to actually write and read data.
But once these problems are solved, It might be that your harddisk
or DVD is not any longer your biggest data storage, instead you
could explore the billions of secret contents of your “Natto”
storage device.
Uhh.., smelly computer… Natto drive ?
Kobaan.
How convenient…
