DNA as Storage for Mankind’s Permanent Record

In this era of cloud storage and ever-recoverable user accounts, the idea of data just “disappearing” can seem downright odd. The EU has had to pass Right to be Forgotten legislation just to require companies to work to make it possible for data to go away. Yet given the sheer volume of data being generated and made available on the Internet these days, can that trend possibly persist? Tweets already pass out of easy access through search in just a few weeks’ time. The Internet is beginning to buckle under the weight of user-generated video. Can digital storage media progress fast enough to keep up with mankind’s ability to generate ones and zeroes?

Perhaps it doesn’t have to. In DNA, evolution has come up with a highly specialized form of storage: physically compact and unusually durable. DNA is nature’s hard drive, and although it’s certainly not perfect, it also has some cool features that beat even the most advanced digital technology. Recent advances could take DNA’s abilities in data storage from theory to practice, bringing molecular memory into the mosaic of technologies that let mankind store knowledge outside the brain.

THE DATA “CRISIS”
At the end of the day, it’s a good problem to have: From the Internet to genomic sequencing, too many people want to use this new world’s rich, innovative features. It’s also a potentially debilitating problem that reduces user interest in the Internet, and puts the integrity of potentially important data at risk. If we have so much data to store and we can’t afford multiple redundant backups, then eventually power surges and hardware failures will lead to knowledge that fundamentally disappears. Consider the fact that despite everything we know today—about topics ranging from nuclear fusion to black holes to genetic engineering—we still don’t know, and never will know, just what knowledge was lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria. You can’t reinvent the thoughts of ancient people, nor can you rediscover the historical insights of unique documents and ledgers once they’ve become ash. It might seem trivial now, but if a tweet passes on to be forgotten and never recovered, isn’t that an equivalent sort of loss? The Library of Congress tried to step up and manage the full archive of Twitter posts a few years ago, but at close to half a trillion messages, the project has stalled and may still never see the light of day. YouTube execs have claimed the video platform is putting up something like 400 new hours of video every minute—a figure that, if accurate, makes it clear why Google has struggled to make the wildly successful business even modestly profitable. With wearables enabling such detailed tracking of personal metrics, this upward trend in data generation is not going to change anytime soon.

NEXT-GENERATION DATA STORAGE
In its March 2013 issue, PC Magazine published an article on an amazing breakthrough in DNA science: Harvard University researchers had managed to store 700TB of information on just a single gram of material. It was an incredible proof of concept, and a reminder of how biology is really just genetic data given form. Yet, in the wake of that discovery, there was a surprising reaction: serious interest. It turns out that long-term storage of a whole lot of data is a more pressing concern than the researchers had anticipated. Since then, they’ve set up a commercial business based on the idea. The basic appeal is twofold. DNA can store dizzying amounts of information in an extremely small physical volume, and it has the capacity to last longer than any magnetic or optical signal could ever hope to. The first of these advantages is hard to overstate: DNA can hold a lot of data. That 700TB achievement is astonishing, but it is in no way the limit of what nucleic acids could achieve; in theory, one gram of DNA could hold up to 455 exabytes (EB) of information—more than all the current digital data in the world, by a huge margin. Even if we only ever achieve 1 percent of this theoretical capacity, due to inefficiencies and the necessity of having multiple redundant copies, that’s still 4.5EB per gram, the equivalent of 4.5 million 1TB hard drives. On the other hand, DNA can also be long-lived. This is a bit counterintuitive, as DNA is actually quite fragile and notorious for breaking while you’re trying to work with it. DNA isn’t durable, given that you have to keep it in fairly peaceful conditions, but it is stable, in that if you do care for it properly it could remain intact for millions of years. Fossilized bone has managed to keep samples safe for tens and even hundreds of thousands of years, so scientists working with high-quality glass and vacuum tubes should be able to come up with something as well. Making and replicating DNA data has also never been easier, with automated systems for creating a tailored DNA molecule from a digital code, and highthroughput replication techniques that can create thousands of copies in just an hour or two. Credit biological evolution, of course, but also the scientists who have managed to make use of biology’s highly specialized solutions.

DNA’S DOWNSIDE
On the other hand, DNA isn’t perfect. It’s good for use as a long-term library, but not as an interactive archive to be accessed quickly and often. In the case of a Twitter archive, DNA may be able to keep us from getting into a Library of Alexandria situation, but it couldn’t keep the archive searchable. Not only would the sequencing DNA isn’t perfect. It’s good for use as a long-term library, but not as an interactive archive to be accessed quickly and often. process be too slow for modern users, but the process of reading DNA introduces some small danger to the molecule itself—and the whole point is to keep this data safe. That’s why most people are talking about DNA for use as a time capsule. In addition, it’s recently been pointed out that DNA’s very facility with data storage could be our undoing—we didn’t invent it, after all. There’s an almost unimaginable amount of DNA data out there in the biological world, not counting anything extra we derive from analysis of that information, and sequencing more and more of it is becoming mankind’s primary source of new, raw data. Even YouTube can’t keep up with the biomedical and pure science research sectors in terms of the volume of new data created and in need of storage on a daily basis. DNA has more than enough storage capacity to fulfill our needs for the nearand mid-term future of data science—but storage isn’t the only thing we’re interested in doing with data. DNA likely has a part to play in keeping our knowledge and history alive for the coming decades, centuries, and millennia, but you’re not going to be running your operating system off of DNA memory anytime soon.

NEW FRONTIERS
long-term storage of information with relatively low accessibility, and shortterm storage of searchable, easily available data that provides admirable speed but unimpressive permanence. Nonetheless, to the people of the future, it may seem odd that we were ever willing to trust our digital heritage to the transient electrical states of silicon transistors, rather than the hard-nosed reliability of chemistry.

“Skyscraper” Chips Promise Powerful Computing Boost

A team of researchers led by Stanford’s Mohamed M. Sabry Aly, Subhasish Mitra, and H.-S. Philip Wong want to put a “skyscraper” of computer chips in your next PC. The idea is to stack application processors, memory modules, and other components one on top of the other in “a revolutionary new high-rise architecture for computing,” according to the Stanford News Service. Such an “electronic super-device” could power a computer that combines “higher speed with lower energy use [to] outperform conventional approaches by a factor of a thousand,” Wong said. Stacking chips has long been seen as a viable path toward building a more efficient, powerful computing architecture than the current template, which lays out and connects components on a flat board, like “single-story structures in a suburb,” as the researchers put it. But building a “skyscraper” of chips has thus far proven difficult using silicon-based integrated circuits (ICs), which are tough to connect reliably in a stacked structure.

Aly, Mitra, Wong, and their colleagues believe they’ve figured out a way around such issues using “new nano-materials” to construct stacked computer chips in place of traditional silicon ICs. Dubbed Nano-Engineered Computing Systems Technology, or N3XT, the process involves building carbon nanotube transistors (CNTs) in a stacked arrangement. Instead of the relatively limited number of wires in connected stacked silicon chips, an N3XT device could employ “millions of electronic elevators that can move more data over shorter distances than traditional wire, using less energy,” per the researchers. Communication between components in a N3XT system is built in during the actual process of fabrication. Because CNTs can be created at much lower temperatures than silicon-based transistors, it’s possible to build components on top of each other, like a processor on a memory module, while maintaining the integrity of those tiny “electronic elevators,” the researchers noted. Silicon ICs, on the other hand, have to be fabricated separately from each other and then stacked in “3D” arrangements later, which precludes integrating those interconnects from the get-go. The team, which has published its findings in a recent special issue of IEEE Computer magazine, is also incorporating cooling into its N3XT devices, just as traditional two-dimensional computing architectures must have their thermals kept in check to prevent overheating. Stanford mechanical engineers Kenneth Goodson and Mehdi Asheghi are leading the effort to “incorporate thermal cooling layers” in the stacked chips, according to Stanford News Service. One major roadblock to the adoption of N3XT or chip-stacking technologies like it? The global semiconductor industry is massively invested in silicon-based process technology, the researchers noted. “Shifting electronics from a low-rise to a high-rise architecture will demand huge investments from industry,” they said. Still, the incentive to do so is compelling, said N3XT article coauthor Chris Re, a Stanford computer scientist and winner of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” “There are huge volumes of data that sit within our reach and are relevant to some of society’s most pressing problems, from health care to climate change, but we lack the computational horsepower to bring this data to light and use it,” Re said. “As we all hope in the N3XT project, we may have to boost horsepower to solve some of these pressing challenges.”

Samsung XP941 High end M.2 performance

Despite being last year’s model (and originally an OEM drive), the XP941 is still one of the faster PCIe M.2 SSDs available. The drive is sold in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB (as tested) models, and uses the standard 2080 M.2 form factor — no PCIe slot adaptor is included. The XP941 is an AHCI SSD, using four lanes of PCIe 2.0. The drive features Samsung’s own 64Gbit 19nm MLC NAND, with the S4LNO53X01 controller. We tested the 512GB model and not surprisingly, performance was excellent. Peak sequential read and write speeds were 1,075/ 875MB/s — easily outpacing the fast SATA drives as well as some of the PCIe competition. 4K random read and writes were also solid, at 29/102 MB/s, respectively. Samsung rates the drive at 122,000/72,000 IOPS for random 4K read and writes. Performance is degraded on the 256GB and 128GB versions of the SSD, though it’s the write speeds that suffer the most. The drive is rated to 400GB of data writes a day, with a three-year warranty. One boon for laptop users is that the XP941 has a 0.08W low-power idle state that will help your battery last longer. However, check your compatibility, as not all laptops or desktops can boot from the SSD. The 128GB model is available for around $165, while the 256GB will set you back $320. The 512GB model at $640 offers a gigabyte per dollar ratio comparable to other M.2 SSDs.

Plextor M6e Black Edition Besting the SATA 6Gbps competition Review

Hidden under a sleek black cover, with standout red heatsink, the M6e has a rather standard AHCI PCIe M.2 SSD. With the integrated cooling solution clamped over the drive (and a ‘warranty void if removed sticker’ adorning the screws) plus an extra SATA power connector, it’s more than just a PCIe slot adaptor. But still, if you have a suitable PCIe M.2 slot on your motherboard, the SSD could be plugged in directly. This is handy, as it means you could use the drive without taking up an extra PCIe slot if you upgrade your motherboard. Our test SSD had a 256GB capacity, made up of Toshiba MLC NAND coupled to a Marvell 88SS9183 controller working through a PCIe x2 interface. Sequential read and write speeds of 637MB/s and 556MB/s are a cut above SATA SSDs, but not by a huge margin. It’s worth noting that the lower-capacity SSDs have slower write speeds, while the larger ones tend to give a performance boost. The Plextor SSD comes with a Turbo software tool that can use 25% of your system RAM as a drive cache to boost performance. It also supports AES-256 data encryption, but no endurance fi gure is given. The smaller 128GB Plextor SSD costs $220, which isn’t a particularly good deal over the $349 for the 256GB version we tested. The larger 512GB M6e is hard to fi nd, but offers a slightly better price per gigabyte ratio at $660. All the Plextor drives offer a full fi ve-year warranty

Google Now Launcher Make your phone Pure Android.

Most phone manufacturers place their own software ‘skins’ over each Android handset they release, often changing the OS experience (most notably the launcher) for the worse. Thankfully, Google Now Launcher is here to purify your Android phone. Possibly the most exciting app that Google has released in a while, Google Now Launcher brings a Nexus-style purity to your phone, providing it with a stock Android launcher. You can now enjoy an experience that’s previously only been available on the Nexus 5, so long as your device is running Android 4.x or above. The Google Now Launcher also makes Google’s personal assistant a core part of your phone. It’s a Google service that offers personalised information ‘cards’ that you can reach by swiping left on your home screen, in order to choose what you want to receive notifi cations about. It also provides always-on voice capability, which you can reach by saying “OK Google”, and then asking it a question.

YoVivo

With so many cloud storage solutions available, it’s highly likely that you have your documents, images and videos spread out all over the place, making it very di cult to track down a speci c le. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have access to all of your clouds in the one place? That’s exactly what YoVivo! does. Once you’ve given it access to your Camera Roll, social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram and more) and cloud storage accounts (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and more are supported), your les will be accessible from within the app, so you won’t have to go on a scavenger hunt every time you need to nd something. Its user-friendly interface lists all of your services together for easy browsing. There’s even an easy-to-use slideshow creator that lets you drop in images, videos, music and text from any of the les you’ve linked to the app, with further editing options like lters and emoji livening things up further. YoVivo! is useful and fun. Stephen Lambrechts

BitTorrent Shoot

Eager to get away from its reputation as a piracy tool, BitTorrent has gotten into the habit of releasing apps that show a number of positive uses for its P2P protocol. First its storage solution BitTorrent Sync, then its completely private messenger app BitTorrent Bleep, and now comes BitTorrent Shoot, an app that uses P2P technology to send and receive large photo and video batches to your friends super fast. Simply enter Select mode to start picking the les you want to send, then hit ‘Send Selected’ to produce a QR code. Your friend (who must also have the BitTorrent Shoot app installed) can then scan the code, transferring the les directly onto their Camera Roll. The app lets you receive an unlimited amount of transfers for free, though an in-app purchase of $2.49 if you want to send your friends stu after your third batch. BitTorrent Shoot is a fast and easy-to-use app that makes sending multiple les to another device an absolute breeze