Enlarge / Genetics background. 3D render. (credit: NIH ) With humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire for data, archiving it safely has become a bit of a problem. The various means we’ve been using all have tradeoffs in terms of energy and space efficiency, many of which change as the technologies mature. And, as new tech moves in, many earlier storage media become obsolete—to the point where it’s essentially impossible to read some old formats. What if there were a storage medium that would be guaranteed to be readable for as long as humanity’s around and didn’t need any energy to maintain? It’s called DNA, and we’ve become very good at both making and decoding it. Now, two researchers have pushed the limits of DNA storage close to its theoretical maximum using a coding scheme that was originally designed for noisy communication channels. The result: an operating system and some movies were stuffed into genetic code at a density of 215 Petabytes per gram. The new work comes courtesy of Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, who work at the New York Genome Center. They have built on a variety of earlier work. Not much challenge is involved in putting data into DNA: each place in the sequence can hold one of four bases: A, T, C, or G. That lets us write two bits per position. The trick is getting things back out reliably. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Entire operating system written into DNA at 215 Pbytes/gram
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists in China are planning to open a mass-cloning factory by the end of the year. The ambitious and futuristic facility hopes to be mass-producing one million cows every 12 months by 2020. Not only will it clone cattle, but the factory, which will be located in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, will also cater to more specific needs by genetically engineering police dogs and thoroughbred race horses. It is part of a $21m plan which is backed by the Boyalife group in collaboration with South Korean company Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
sciencehabit writes: If you’re a caterpillar, you do not want to meet a parasitic wasp. The winged insect will inject you full of eggs, which will grow inside your body, develop into larvae, and hatch from your corpse. But a new study reveals that wasps have given caterpillars something beneficial during these attacks as well: pieces of viral DNA that become part of the caterpillar genome, protecting them against an entirely different lethal virus. In essence, the wasps have turned caterpillars into genetically modified organisms. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “LACNIC, the regional Internet registry for Latin America and the Caribbean, considers its IPv4 address pool exhausted, because it is down to less than a quarter of an /8, roughly 4 million IPv4 addresses which are reserved for facilitating transitioning mechanisms. Half of those addresses will be assigned on a first come, first served basis, but no more than 1024 addresses per organization every 6 six months. Allocations from the last 2 million addresses will be a maximum of 1024 addresses total per organization. To maintain connectivity, it is now indispensable to make the switch to IPv6. LACNIC’s CEO expressed his concern that many operators and companies still haven’t taken the steps needed to duly address this circumstance. The RIRs for Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America have all imposed similar limitations on IPv4 assignments when they also crossed their local exhaustion thresholds. As of now, only AfriNIC is not in address exhaustion mode.” Joining North America, and Europe/the Middle East/Central Asia. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 