Learn about how we could use DNA to store all of human knowledge for thousands of years. Then, test your podcast knowledge with the Curiosity Challenge trivia game. You’ll also learn about why becoming a parent may help you live longer.
Learn about how we could use DNA to store all of human knowledge for thousands of years. Then, test your podcast knowledge with the Curiosity Challenge trivia game. You’ll also learn about why becoming a parent may help you live longer.
DNA data storage could store all human knowledge in a small space for thousands of years by Grant Currin
Episodes referenced in Curiosity Challenge Trivia game:
If You Want to Live Longer, Become a Parent by Ashley Hamer
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/we-can-use-dna-for-data-storage
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how we could use DNA to store all of human knowledge for thousands of years. Then, we’ll test your podcast knowledge with this month’s Curiosity Challenge trivia game. You’ll also learn about why becoming a parent may help you live longer.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
What do these things have in common: Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the discography of the English electronic band Massive Attack, and every article on Wikipedia?
They’ve all been stored in DNA.
Yeah, you heard that right. It turns out that good ole deoxyribonucleic acid can do way more than encode the instructions for life itself. Those long molecules can be used to store all kinds of information. Even a high-def version of the video for OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass,” which researchers encoded into DNA in 2016.
DNA is powerful stuff, but its structure is pretty simple. A few different molecules bond to form the backbone, and the information is encoded using just 4 molecules: guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine. They’re called nucleotides, and scientists keep things simple by calling each one by the first letter in its name: G, C, A, and T.
Those nucleotides pair up in a very predictable way: G goes with C and A goes with T. In living things, they’re arranged into three-letter sequences called codons, which are instructions that call for a certain protein to be synthesized.
The human genome — that’s all the biological information that makes a person a person — contains about 3 billion base pairs. That’s a lot of space for data.
There are a few different ways that researchers and engineers can use DNA to encode the information they want. In the early days, it was common to use codons to represent letters, numbers, and symbols. Like, the codon AGT could stand for the letter B.
That works fine for short and simple messages, but storing bigger files is another beast.
So these days, things are more complicated. Different research groups use different methods, but almost all of the schemes use insights from genomics, cryptography, and computer science to reliably store massive strings of info.
Using DNA to store information that could fit on a hard drive might sound frivolous, but there are a lot of factors that make DNA one of the best possible data storage options. For one, it lasts a long time. Computer memory degrades on the scale of decades, and new technologies replace old ones all the time. DNA, on the other hand, lasts for centuries, and engineers have their eyes on ways they can use organisms to copy DNA and check for errors so that a message could be stored indefinitely.
DNA is also very compact. That’s no surprise given that nearly every cell in the human body contains that person’s ENTIRE genome. A gram of DNA can theoretically store more than a billion gigabytes.
That’s a lot of cat videos.
It’s time once again for the Curiosity Challenge! Every month, I call up a listener and put them to the test by asking three questions from stories we ran on Curiosity Daily in the previous month. For this Curiosity Challenge, I talked to Jeb, who lives in Baltimore and has been listening to Curiosity Daily for about two years. Play along at home as I test his podcast knowledge! Let's get started.
[trivia-jeb.wav]
Two out of three ain't bad at all. How did YOU do? If you’d like to play next month, OR if you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, shoot us an email at curiosity at discovery dot com, or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208!
One popular reason for having kids is to have someone to take care of you in your old age. According to research, this is a very solid plan — but not necessarily for the reason you think. It turns out that people who have children actually live longer than people who don't, and those benefits are even greater the older you get. Good news if you’re like me, and you’ve — perhaps recently — had to deal with a screaming infant at 3 in the morning, and wondered how many years he’s taking off your life. Perhaps… as recently as this morning! But I digress. (Also, I’m being flippant — I love being a dad.)
Previous research has shown that adults with children live longer than those without. But researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute decided to dig deeper into exactly why this happens. So for a 2017 study, the team used data from Sweden's national registry to follow nearly 1.5 million men and women born between 1911 and 1925 from their 60th birthday until either their death, their departure from the country, or the end of the study in 2014, whichever came first.
The study found that at age 60, fathers had almost two years greater life expectancy than men without children, and mothers had a little over a year greater life expectancy than childless women. Once those people reached age 80, the differences were closer to a year for men and six months for women. But when it came to the overall risk of dying within a year, the differences were more pronounced the older the study subjects got. When adjusted for educational level and marital status, the difference in death risk between men with and without children went from 0.06 percent at age 60 — so, barely any difference — to a full 1.47 percent at age 90!
The study also found that the benefits of having kids were even greater for unmarried men than for married men. According to the study, this may be because marriage has been shown to help men live longer, so any leg up unmarried men can get will have more of an impact.
So next time you’re soothing a baby in the middle of the night or trying to get your teenager to clean his room, take comfort in the fact that you’ll probably be rewarded with a longer life.
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about a new computer model that’s gotten us closer to figuring out how humans choose their mates;
Why engineers created a temporary “smart tattoo” that emits light;
How scientists will know if life ever existed on Mars;
A new fossil that’s shattered the record for oldest DNA;
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Grant Currin and Ashley Hamer, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, MAKE SOME BABIES, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!