DVD uses bug protein to store data

News in Science ^ | 7 July 2006 | Anna Salleh

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

"COULD" allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information. Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston reported his findings at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane this week. "What this "WILL" do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," he says. "

Your point has merit.

But the "COULD" claim applies to projected storage capacity well into the terabyte range - a mass storage function, done by tapes in the bad old days and now by multiple DVDs.
And the "WILL" claim applies to the different, tho similar, function of the hard drive.

It can be read, "The difficult (making something which supplants the hard drive" we do immediately (a matter of months). The impossible (supplanting the DVD with the same technology that supplants the hard drive) takes a little longer (a matter of a couple of years)."

A claim of "commercialization in 12 months" is basically a claim that "It's easy to make these things right now; it's only a matter of ramping up production to commercial scale."

[strategofr]

"A claim of "commercialization in 12 months" is basically a claim that "It's easy to make these things right now; it's only a matter of ramping up production to commercial scale.""

I don't notice any such claim in the article so the statement confuses me.

""The ground state could be the zero and any of the intermediates could be the one," he says."

Here is a good clue to what is going on. They have yet to choose what symbolizes the "1" in the binary system. I think we can safely conclude that the research is in an early stage.

Over the years, I have seen dozens of stories similar to this. I can tell you, most of them come to nothing. The thing is, the amount of BS in the air is definitely increasing, in my opinion. I don't know enough about the scientific establishment to say what people gain from this sort of thing---but I'm sure there's a reason.

[dfwgator]

"What this will do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," he says.

I heard all that same crap when they said 64K of memory was more than you ever needed. Trust me, whatever memory capabilities they come up with, they will find a way to use it all.

[AntiGuv]

I was tired and obviously not thinking clearly when I posted last night! :)

[InterceptPoint]

The star at the centre of the high-capacity DVD is a light-activated protein found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum.

I thought everybody knew that.

I remember when I was kid building up a small disk drive based on the salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum light activated protein. It was a piece of cake. I happened to live near a salt marsh where good old Halo-sal used to hang out in large quantities so that made it pretty easy to get high quality material.

Nevertheless, it will be nice when we can run down to Fry's and buy a stack of these for $20. Perfect for storing those 1080p videos of the grandkids.

[jmcenanly]

We've come a long way in a short time. I remember when it was the thing to do to get bugs out of the computer.