Smash Notes
Dina Zielinski
Episodes
Notes
TED Talks Daily · How we can store digital data in DNA | Dina Zielinski
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When Was the First Hard Drive, According to Dina Zielinski?
On TED Talks Daily, Dina Zielinski says IBM released the first hard drive in 1956. She describes it being loaded for shipping in front of a small audience. It held about as much as one MP3 and weighed more than a ton, at roughly 10,000 dollars a megabyte. She reaches that machine by stepping back from a 1984 TED talk in which a Sony executive explained the compact disc, and she notes that thirty years after that talk people were still discussing digital storage. Her point is that storage keeps changing because every medium eventually wears out or becomes obsolete.
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What Practical Problems Does Dina Zielinski Describe in Storing Data in DNA?
On TED Talks Daily, Dina Zielinski says DNA outlasts man-made devices, but it is not perfect. You recover a stored message by sequencing the DNA, and every retrieval uses up some of that DNA, because loss is part of sequencing. Sequencing also writes errors into the A's, T's, C's, and G's. Copying the DNA is cheaper than synthesizing it again. Her team made about 200 trillion copies of their files and got the data back. To live with the errors, they borrowed an algorithm used for streaming video, which also has to rebuild an original file from enough zeros and ones.
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How Do We Store Data on DNA
By first learning to sequence, or read DNA. After, how to write or synthesize it. Anything that can be stored as 0s and 1s can be stored in DNA. Once sequenced and transferred, we have the ability to read, write, and copy DNA.
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What Makes DNA So Great
DNA can store a ton of information in a minuscule space. DNA is also more durable and it does not require electricity to store it.
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How Can We Store All of Our Data Timelessly
There is a solution that has been around for billions of years. DNA is nature’s oldest storage device. It contains all the necessary information to build and maintain a human being.
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Why Has Digital Data Become a Problem
Because the devices have evolved dramatically. All media eventually becomes obsolete. Digital storage has become expensive and none of our devices stand against the test of time.