n Nebraska they are shooting windmills. Picture this…a bright red Ford f-350, 10mpg, cruising at a brisk 60 miles per hour. A long, very long, straight highway stretching to the horizon. A stiff breeze at 20 knots out of the southwest. Something unusual in the distance – a hill, a mere 4 foot high rise in the road, and up over it comes the truck barreling down the asphalt with two homegrown locals, pigeon-eyed in the front seat. The passenger side window slowly rolls down, the long barrel of a .308 caliber deer rifle pokes out into the air, the gas pedal is pushed to the floor.
On the horizon looms the lightly silhouetted shape of an enormous 410 foot tall, white gentle giant, easily turning in the current of wind.
In the guzzling truck the passenger caulks his rifle, reaches down between his legs to grab another sip of Bud Light then centers the beast in his sight. Now closing in at 85 miles per hour the driver positions the truck adjacent to the twirlingly tall pest. The giant picks up speed, twirling ever faster as the breeze picks up.
Then, when the time is finally right…..
In the latest effort to contend with exploding quantities of digital data, researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building block of life, and then accurately read back the text.
The experiment, reported Thursday in the journal Science, may point a way toward eventual data-storage devices with vastly more capacity for their size than today's computer chips and drives.
"A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet," said Harvard University molecular geneticist George Church, the project's senior researcher.
In their work, the group translated the English text of a coming book on genomic engineering into actual DNA.
DNA contains genetic instructions written in a simple but powerful code made up of four chemicals called bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).
The Harvard researchers started with the digital version of the book, which is composed of the ones and zeros that computers read. Next, on paper, they translated the zeros into either the A or C of the DNA base pairs, and changed the ones into either the G or T.
Then, using now-standard laboratory techniques, they created short strands of actual DNA that held the coded sequence—almost 55,000 strands in all. Each strand contained a portion of the text and an address that indicated where it occurred in the flow of the book.
In that form—a viscous liquid or solid salt—a billion copies of the book could fit easily into a test tube and, under normal conditions, last for centuries, the researchers said.