It’s been a long Friday to wrap up my first half week of graduate school: it started in the morning with a three hour test illustrating how little I knew about cell biology, followed by listening to people talk while snacking on free food, and then ending with a fun night out with some of my new classmates. I definitely consumed more than my fair share of guacamole and chocolate chip cookies today.
The days have been going by quickly since I am just working on my summer project presentation and listening to program introductions. Next week figures to be a lot tougher with actual classes and the beginning of my next research rotation. In the meantime though, I plan on to enjoy the weekend with some paint balling and maybe another night out.
That’s enough about my life…the real highlight of the day is one of those “science is AWESOME” discoveries I came across. When I say awesome, I’m not just talking about something that only graduate students and professors of the field are excited about, I’m referring to a general sense of WOW for humanity. Turns out some professors at Harvard developed a way to store binary data into DNA, similar to the way 1s and 0s are currently stored in hard drives. What’s amazing is the information density stored in this DNA…700 terabytes of data into a single gram. Just for reference, our department is considering an upgrade to our storage capabilities by switching to a file server with 185 terabytes of data. This is an ridiculous amount of data to be put into something you can carry around in your fingertips. Think of all the possibilities, just in terms of science fiction movies alone!
On a related note, my new apartment is close to campus and comfortable. The only downside is that my path to school now takes me past this very creepy statue:
Thanks….but no thanks for the statue
That’s so cool. Enough space to chronicle everything, everything! That’s so crazy.
Binary in DNA? Science is awesome!