Dorothea Lasky

goatinthesnow:

Within a magic Prison - E.D.

(Source: goatinthesnow)

scinerds:

Half a Million DVDs of Data Stored in Gram of DNA

Paleontologists routinely resurrect and sequence DNA from woolly mammoths and other long-extinct species. Future paleontologists, or librarians, may do much the same to pull up Shakespeare’s sonnets, listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, or view photos. Researchers in the United Kingdom report today that they’ve encoded these works and others in DNA and later sequenced the genetic material to reconstruct the written, audio, and visual information.

The new work isn’t the first example of large-scale storage of digital information in DNA. Last year, researchers led by bioengineers Sriram Kosuri and George Church of Harvard Medical School reported that they stored a copy of one of Church’s books in DNA, among other things, at a density of about 700 terabits per gram, more than six orders of magnitude more dense than conventional data storage on a computer hard disk. Now, researchers led by molecular biologists Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, U.K., report online today in Nature that they’ve improved the DNA encoding scheme to raise that storage density to a staggering 2.2 petabytes per gram, three times the previous effort.

To do so, the team first translated written words or other data into a standard binary code of 0s and 1s, and then converted this to a trinary code of 0s, 1s, and 2s—a step needed to help prevent the introduction of errors. The researchers then rewrote that data as strings of DNA’s chemical bases: As, Gs, Cs, and Ts. At the storage density achieved, a single gram of DNA would hold 2.2 million gigabits of information, or about what you can store in 468,000 DVDs. What’s more, the researchers also added an error correction scheme, encoding the information multiple times, among other tricks, to ensure that it could be read back with 100% accuracy.

momalibrary:

And the award for best outfit from an artist’s invitation card goes to…Louise Nevelson (1986). -ds

nypl:

The dog exists only for man, man exists only for cats.- Robert E. Howard

This Caturday we’ll walk on the dark side with Robert E. Howard, pulp fiction legend, creator of Conan the Barbarian, and member of the Lovecraft Circle, who was born 107 years ago last week [Born Jan. 22, 1906]. Howard unflinchingly explored the dark side of cats in his essay The Beast From the Abyss. Even the most devoted cat fanciers, unabashed kitty-coddlers, and devotees of the feline mystique must nod in agreement with some his reflections. Legendary comic artist Peter Kuper later immortalized Howard’s essay with vivid etchings in his graphic novel The Last Cat Book.