Harvard Cracks DNA Storage, Crams 700 Terabytes Into A Single Gram

Harvard researchers announce they have cracked DNA based memory storage, packing a massive 700 terabytes of binary data into single gram.

This changes everything, not only for the amazing ability to store 233 3Terabyte drives in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky, but also because the DNA is being synthesized in a memory addressable format that is being directly manipulated by digital microprocessors – Mandatory follow-up reading here.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.

Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.

Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though… well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!)

It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely…

Source: Refreshing News

As noted above, the Harvard technology combined with this technology and you have one hell of an Orwellian powder keg…

Scientists Successfully Implant Chip That Controls The Brain Allowing Thoughts, Memory And Behavior To Be Transferred From One Brain To Another Scientists working at the University of Southern California, home of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, have created an artificial memory system that allows thoughts, memories and learned behavior to be transferred from one brain to another.

In a scene right out of a George Orwell novel, a team of scientists working in the fields of “neural engineering” and “Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems” have successfully created a chip that controls the brain and can be used as a storage device for long-term memories. In studies the scientists have been able to record, download and transfer memories into other hosts with the same chip implanted. The advancement in technology brings the world one step closer to a global police state and the reality of absolute mind control.

More terrifying is the potential for implementation of what was only a science fiction fantasy – the “Thought Police” – where the government reads people’s memories and thoughts and then rehabilitate them through torture before they ever even commit a crime based on a statistical computer analysis showing people with certain types of thoughts are likely to commit a certain type of crime in the future.

We already pre-emptively invade nations and torture alleged terrorist suspects with absolutely no due process of law, so the idea of pre-emptively torturing a terrorist suspect before hand to prevent them from committing an act of terrorism in the future really isn’t that far fetched of an idea.

Perhaps a less sensational example, than those I just depicted out of own of Orwell’s famous dystopian novels would be using the technology as it is depicted the modern day Matrix movies, in which computer programs are uploaded into people’s brains allowing them to instantly learn how to perform a wide variety of tasks.

That is exactly the example that Smart Planet uses in their write-up on the USC press release.

Scientists invent a new chip that controls the brain and allows thoughts, memory and behavior to be transferred from one brain to another.

The Matrix reality: Scientists successfully implant artificial memory system

It seems the sci-fi industry has done it again. Predictions made in novels like Johnny Mnemonic and Neuromancer back in the 1980s of neural implants linking our brains to machines have become a reality.

Back then it seemed unthinkable that we’d ever have megabytes stashed in our brain as Keanu Reeves’ character Johnny Mnemonic did in the movie based on William Gibson’s novel. Or that The Matrix character Neo could have martial arts abilities uploaded to his brain, making famous the line, “I know Kung Fu.”   (Why Keanu Reeves became the poster boy of sci-fi movies, I’ll never know.)  But today we have macaque monkeys that can control a robotic arm with thoughts alone. We have paraplegics given the ability to control computer cursors and wheelchairs with their brain waves. Of course this is about the brain controlling a device. But what about the other direction where we might have a device amplifying the brain? While the cochlear implant might be the best known device of this sort, scientists have been working on brain implants with the goal to enhance memory. This sort of breakthrough could lead to building a neural prosthesis to help stroke victims or those with Alzheimer’s. Or at the extreme, think uploading Kung Fu talent into our brains.

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Which only gets more nightmarish when that’s just the detonator and your high explosive  is…

NSA Building A $2 Billion Quantum Computer Artificial Intelligence Spy Center The NSA is a data center to house a 512 qubit quantum computer capable of learning, reproducing the brain’s cognitive functions, and programming itself.

The National Security Center is building a highly fortified $2 Billion highly top secret complex simply named the “Utah Data Center” which will soon be home to the Hydrogen bomb of cybersecurity – A 512 Qubit Quantum Computer — which will revitalize the the “total information awareness” program originally envisioned by George Bush in 2003.

The news of the data center comes after Department of Defense contractor Lockheed Martin secured a contract with D-Wave for $10 million for a 512 qubit Quantum Computer code-named Vesuvius.

Vesuvius is capable of executing a massive number of computations at once, more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is would take millions of years on a standard desktop.

The computer will be able to crack even the most secure encryption and will give the US government a quantum leap into technologies once only dreamed of including the rise of the world’s very first all-knowing omniscient self-teaching artificial intelligence.

The D-Wave Quantum computer boasts of a wide array of features including:

• Binary classification – Enables the quantum computer to be fed vast amounts of complex input data, including text, images, and videos and label the material
• Quantum Unsupervised Feature Learning QUFL – Enables the computer to learn on its own, as well as create and optimize its own programs to make itself run more efficiently.
• Temporal QUFL – Enables the Computer to predict the future based in information it learns through Binary classification and the QUFL feature.
• Artificial Intelligence Via Quantum Neural Network – Enables the computer to completely reconstruct the human brain’s cognitive processes and teach itself how to make better decisions and better predict the future based.

D-Wave’s 512-qubit chip, code-named Vesuvius

D-Wave’s 512-qubit chip, code-named Vesuvius. The white square on the right contains the quantum goodness. Photo: D-Wave

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