Foodomics 2013 - Third Edition. Food Analysis: Foodomics. Hacking President’s DNA. The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace. Miles Donovan This is how the future arrived. It began innocuously, in the early 2000s, when businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more efficiently be crowd-sourced to a larger group of people via the Internet. Initially, we crowd-sourced the design of T‑shirts (Threadless.com) and the writing of encyclopedias (Wikipedia.com), but before long the trend started making inroads into the harder sciences.
Soon enough, these sites were flooded with requests that went far beyond cancer. Some party drug—all she got, it seemed, was the flu. Massive DNA Databases. Starting in the mid-1980s, a serial killer murdered at least 10 women in the Los Angeles area. Nicknamed the “Grim Sleeper” because of the long dormancy between his crimes, he eluded capture for nearly 25 years. Then, in 2010, police arrested a man in California for what appeared to be a totally unrelated felony weapons charge.
State law required the man to submit a DNA sample for a national DNA database. Typically a DNA database search looks for an exact match between a profile of DNA left at a crime scene by an unknown person and the profile of a known convicted offender. It focuses on 13 places in the genome (the full complement of our DNA) where bits of genetic material vary from person to person.
This time, however, the search was more subtle. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content. DNA hard drive. The application of data is rarely predictable. "Merit" is defined by the data's value in solving a particular quesiton or problem.
Unless we can predict the future we have no way of assigning value (or lack thereof) to any data. I work in a non-profit and we always struggle with relatively basic things like how much personal or demographic information could/should we capture on donors or prospective donors so that we can better communicate with them in the future. Inevitably we end up with scenarios where we say "Man, if we had just started tracking that one thing 5 years ago this problem would be much simpler to solve". Vice versa, I have easily solved problems by reporting on and analyzing data using one simple piece that was likely obtuse and not immediately valuable to the people that started tracking it.
The next step, though, is to somehow collate and index the data so it is readily accessible. AyeAyeCapn has the right of it, but think also of historical value. Applied on dna strand. By Robert F. Service, ScienceNOW Paleontologists routinely resurrect and sequence DNA from woolly mammoths and other long-extinct species. Future paleontologists, or librarians, may do much the same to pull up Shakespeare’s sonnets, listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, or view photos. Researchers in the United Kingdom report today that they’ve encoded these works and others in DNA and later sequenced the genetic material to reconstruct the written, audio, and visual information. The new work isn’t the first example of large-scale storage of digital information in DNA.
Last year, researchers led by bioengineers Sriram Kosuri and George Church of Harvard Medical School reported that they stored a copy of one of Church’s books in DNA, among other things, at a density of about 700 terabits per gram, more than six orders of magnitude more dense than conventional data storage on a computer hard disk. Harvard’s Kosuri calls the latest study “good work.” Iris Biometrics. Biometric security systems that can identify individuals à la Minority Report based on the unique patterns in their irises have been touted as a fast, accurate and efficient way to control access to sensitive information and facilities. But until now, their reach has literally been limited.
The iris's fine texture tends to remain stable throughout one's life. But one of the biggest factors working against iris-scanning biometrics, particularly at law-enforcement facilities and military bases in hot zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, is the difficulty in obtaining a clear iris scan from a distance of more than a few dozen centimeters. Researchers are working on this problem by developing technology that will not only enable iris scanning at distances of up to about 12 meters, but will also simultaneously scan a person's face to more accurately identify those seeking access. "The iris is part of the face," he adds, "so why not use both? " The U.S.