Timeline Photos. The Scale of the Universe 2. Numberphile - Videos about Numbers and Stuff. Graham's Number - Video - Numberphile - Videos about Numbers and Stuff. The Scale of the Universe 2. Sixty Symbols - Physics and Astronomy videos. Book written in DNA code | Science. Scientists have for the first time used DNA to encode the contents of a book. At 53,000 words, and including 11 images and a computer program, it is the largest amount of data yet stored artificially using the genetic material.
The researchers claim that the cost of DNA coding is dropping so quickly that within five to 10 years it could be cheaper to store information using this method than in conventional digital devices. Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA – the chemical that stores genetic instructions in almost all known organisms – has an impressive data capacity. One gram can store up to 455bn gigabytes: the contents of more than 100bn DVDs, making it the ultimate in compact storage media. A three-strong team led by Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School has now demonstrated that the technology to store data in DNA, while still slow, is becoming more practical. Writing the data to DNA took several days. DNA has numerous advantages over traditional digital storage media.
Higgs boson: A cause for celebration. It has been hailed as a triumph for international science, the coalescing of four decades of intellectual and engineering effort to create a new understanding of the universe's structure. And certainly the discovery of the Higgs boson represents a significant milestone in the history of particle physics. Consider the logistics. At Cern, in Geneva, around 10,000 scientists have collaborated for several years at the £5bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – an underground circular device built on the scale of London's Circle line but constructed to a billionth of a metre accuracy – to uncover a sub-atomic entity that gives stars, planets and living creatures their mass. By battering streams of protons together at colossal energies round this tunnel, they have transformed our understanding of the cosmos. And it is particularly sweet success for the UK. But at the time of its proposal 30 years ago, the idea of the LHC certainly did not overwhelm scientists or politicians.
The Higgs boson search continues ... into ANOTHER dimension. High performance access to file storage Special report Now that all the fanfare over the sighting of a Higgs-like boson in the Large Hadron Collider has died down, CERN scientists have a few burning questions about the particle. The gigantic proton accelerator will be shut down this year, but physicist Paris Sphicas told The Register the boffins should be able to gather enough data about the particle's properties to tackle two of their conundrums before the big switch off.
Inside the Large Hadron Collider's tunnels. Credit: CERN For those still baffled by last month's discovery, the proposed Higgs boson helps explain how everything around us actually exists: its own existence suggests that the Higgs field is real and that particles moving through this omnipresent field gain mass. However, although the Higgs field in theory gives everything else mass, it doesn't appear to be giving mass to the boson itself, a mystery that can only be answered with further study of this Higgs-like particle. Space Shuttle Discovery - 360VR Images. Boffins find 17,425,170-digit prime number. High performance access to file storage The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has struck again, finding the largest-ever Mersenne prime number.
The number, the 48th Mersenne prime found, is 17,425,170 digits long and therefore most comfortably represented as 257885161-1 . The previous record-holder was a mere 12,978,189 digits. If you want to read the whole thing, you can do so here, but be warned: a 22.45 megabyte download awaits. Mersenne primes, as we've reported before are numbers of the form Mn = 2n − 1, where n is an integer. 17th century French monk Marin Mersenne was rather fond of them.
So is Curtis Cooper, a professor at the University of Central Missouri who participates in GIMPS, a distributed prime number hunter that works in the mode made famous by alien-spotting app SETI@Home. Both use individual PCs to work on small portions of larger tasks and collate results centrally. Marin Mersenne.