Eugen Leitl wrote [at 03:15 PM 7/23/2007] :
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3189
In a project that seems like it was hatched from
the brain of a science fiction writer, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) is growing computer chips around insects
for use in surveillance, reports The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26DNA.html
<quote>
Using the same code that computer keyboards use,
the Japanese group, led by Masaru Tomita of Keio
University, wrote four copies of Albert
Einsteins famous formula, E=mc2, along with
1905, the date that the young Einstein derived
it, into the bacteriums genome, the
4.2-million-long string of As, Gs, Ts and Cs
that determine everything the little bug is and
everything its ever going to be.
The point was not to celebrate Einstein. The
feat, they said in a paper published in the
journal Biotechnology Progress, was a
demonstration of DNA as the ultimate information
storage material, able to withstand floods,
terrorism, time and the changing fashions in
technology, not to mention the ability to be
imprinted with little unobtrusive trademark
labels little Made by Monsanto tags, say.
In so doing they have accomplished at least a
part of the dream that Jaron Lanier, a computer
scientist and musician, and David Sulzer, a
biologist at Columbia, enunciated in 1999. To
create the ultimate time capsule as part of the
millennium festivities at this newspaper, they
proposed to encode a years worth of the New York
Times magazine into the junk DNA of a cockroach.
The archival cockroach will be a robust
repository, Mr. Lanier wrote, able to survive
almost all conceivable scenarios.
</quote>
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
