DNA Microchips, A New Inspiring Technology

An impressive new development in terms of hardware technology has been implemented with success, it follows research work in the US by George Church and Sriram Kosuri of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. It is called DNA Microchips, and the first experiment consisted of encoding a 5.27 megabit book using DNA sequences, subsquently the post-processing was able to read the book using DNA sequencing novel technique.  The new technology resulted in this experiment is that DNA sequencing can be used as an excellent alternative for hardware implementations of long-term storage of digital information.

Following this new experiment, it resulted a 1,000 times more data than has been encoded in DNA previously.  DNA consists of nucleotides, where each nucleotide can be used to encode two bits of data.  As a result, implementations of this theory are able to produce densities up to a 1 million gigabits per cubic millimeter, furthermore with a mere four grams of DNA in theory is capable of storing all the digital data created in one year. In comparison to current hardware technology, this new DNA Microchips are so much denser than any other current digital storage media which contain properties which allows data to be read thousands of years after they were encoded.

Journal reference: Science

New Photo Technology, Photo Capabilities to Reflect Light As 3D Objects

It has been announced an innovative technology which allows for printing processing as 3D objects. If then follows that this process permits the production of printed photos that contain properties that behave differently depending on light angles, similar to a 3D object. The technology basically consists of a  "reflectance paper" covered with thousands of tiny dimples.

This innovation was presented and researched by a team of researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, Hewlett-Packard and 3M.

James Davis from the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, stated "If the paper is flat, it will always look flat no matter what you print on it. So the question became how to get the surface of the paper to have geometry to it ...With the reflectance paper, for each pixel we have a little dimple that has all angular directions on its surface. Now we can print ink over it in a way that controls the angles of light that will be reflected from each pixel."

Dancing and Martial Arts, Done by a Robot

For all Information Technology enthusiasts and particularly Artificial Intelligence the Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics sometime can appear too short on the possibilities of innovation.  We have found a robot that is capable of dancing, the humanoid robot was developed by Dongbu Robot.  This robot costs around $900, and is programmable which includes commands for movement and dancing. More information is available here.

Science Evolution Perspective

Most technological innovation starts on a published scientific paper. In today's context, its speed of innovation is slowing down due to mainly two factors. Firstly, the time it takes to publish a scientific paper. Secondly the amount of instant on-line publishing done by non-traditional media, such as: blogs, websites and many other various social media tools. On the second type of publishing the amount of data being published on a daily basis is tremendous and the lucky data that is picked up by relevant readers, in order to be thoroughly analysed and replicated can take many months, before being accepted as recognised science.

However, it has been envisaged that in the near few years, scientists will communicate almost instantly. As a result, distribution and access to information will be fast and as wide reaching as possible with little barriers to access. Recently, sites such as arXiv, Academia.edu, Mendeley,  ResearchGate and some in the UK have already instant distribution. In the case of the UK, the government is creating a bill which will allow access to science journals free of charge.

Following this new faster distribution scientific papers will be possible to become available to the world community in just one day. Therefore it can be assumed that scientific discoveries will have a better framework for quicker and better findings to benefit the world.