The good kind of computer bugs

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

From: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32965

A US boffin has announced that he has worked out a way to dispatch
hard drives into the dustbin of history by smearing DVDs with
genetically altered microbes.

Professor V Renugopalakrishnan says his DVDs, with bugs pre-installed,
can store more than 50 terabytes of data which is enough to make
computer hard disks obsolete.

Renugopalakrishnan uses a light-activated protein found in the
membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium Salinarum, which is
better know to its friends as bacteriorhodopsin.

It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When
light shines on bacteriorhodopsin, it is converted to a series of
intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and colour before
returning to its 'ground state'.

Renugopalakrishnan modified the microbe's DNA so that it produces the
protein so that it will last for several years.

Protein-based DVDs will be able to store at least 20 times more than
the Blue-ray and eventually even up to 50 terabytes of data. You can
pack literally thousands and thousands of those proteins on a media
like a DVD, a CD or a film or whatever, Renugopalakrishnan claimed.
-------------------------


-JP<who will believe it when he sees it>
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