DNA is an acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid.

Last month I read an article in Us News & World Report (February 14) titled, The wet and wild future of computers..DNA strands may replace chips and electrons. This month in Discover (April issue) another article titled, Gene-ius Computer Nature (Nature..January 13) also had an article titled, Computing on Surfaces

Today's supercomputers can perform hundreds of gigaflops (billions of mathematical operations per second), whereas DNA computers can perform in the range of petaflops (millions of billions of mathematical operations per second).

An analogy: If one tractor can mow 2 acres of grass per hour, it will take 5 hours to mow a 10-acre field. However, 100 billion microscopic lawn mowers, each capable of mowing one blade of grass per hour, will finish the job in one hour (assuming 10 acres contain 100 billion blades of grass) An example of massive-parallel computation.

What an interesting world we live in.

-- tc (trashcan-man@webtv.net), March 10, 2000

Answers

Maybe there are links to these articles?

The Sacramento BEE posted a story, maybe in the last 3 weeks, about a person, maybe at UC Berkeley (sorry I don't have the details, but the news clipping is at home and I'm at work [!!!]) who had actually produced a "chip" that incorporates a living cell. The pores of the cell open and close at certain electrical frequencies that can be controlled by hardware.

Undoubtedly the world will become even more interesting, hmm?

-- johno (jobriy2k@yahoo.com), March 10, 2000.