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Magnetic bacteria create a biological hard drive
TECHNOLOGY
nick veasy/getty
My PC has a biodrive
form the magnetic regions on the drive, with around 100 grains corresponding to one bit. Instead of granular media, Staniland’s team produce bitHard drives based on bacteria will make today’s discs look puny patterned media. They start with a gold surface coated in chemicals in a chessboard pattern so that one set of squares binds proteins and the other repels them. They then apply the magnet-producing protein and coat the surface with an iron solution, which the protein-covered squares convert into magnetic material. As the name suggests, each magnetic square in bit-patterned media can store one bit. Each square Staniland’s team have so far produced is around 20 micrometres wide, far too bulky to store data with a density comparable to today’s hard drives. She says they now plan to test out nano-sized squares, 1000 times smaller and much closer to existing drive density. –Stuffed with stuff– Eventually, she hopes to create a hard drive with a single iron the University of Leeds, UK, have years to do all of its experiments particle per square, which will Jacob Aron borrowed a trick from nature to through evolution, so there is store as much as 1 terabyte of data COMPUTER virus destroyed your build a new kind of hard drive. almost no point in us starting per square inch – far beyond the hard drive? Don’t worry, some day Certain strains of bacteria from scratch,” says Sarah capability of most hard drives. bacteria might build you a bigger absorb iron to make magnetic Staniland, who led the research “They’ve done nice work and better one. nanoparticles that let them (Small, vol 8, p 204). showing how you can make Hard drives store data on navigate using the Earth’s Hard drives are usually made by particles on a surface,” says discs coated with a metallic magnetic field. The team have “sputtering”, in which clouds of Thomas Thomson, who studies film divided into tiny magnetic extracted the protein behind argon ions are fired at a sheet of data storage at the University of regions, each of which stores a this process and used it to create magnetic material, knocking off Manchester, UK. “But it is some single bit – the more regions you magnetic patterns that can store particles, which are deposited as a distance away from what you can squeeze on to a disc, the bigger data. “We’re using and abusing thin film on a disc. Groups would need if you were seriously the capacity. Now, researchers at nature because it’s had billions of of these particles, called grains, contemplating it as a product.” n
Snow snaps give you a better weather picture WHEN it starts snowing, start snapping. Sharing your photos online could help fill holes in satellite weather data caused by cloud cover. Haipeng Zhang, a computer scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington, and colleagues looked at 150 million photos on the website 18 | NewScientist | 5 May 2012
Flickr that had been geo-tagged in the US. First, their software analysed the image’s tags and visual features to estimate the presence of snow. Then they applied a statistical test to determine a measure of confidence in that estimate – a picture tagged with the word “snow” taken in the same location and at the same time as hundreds of non-snow pictures is unlikely to be accurate. The number of accurately identified photos in each location indicates whether or not it had snowed in that area. When compared with observations
from ground-based weather stations in New York City, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, the Flickr photos estimated snowfall with 95 per cent accuracy. This approach isn’t particularly useful in major cities, however, since we already have good data on urban snowfall. Testing the Flickr photos against nationwide satellite data
“Flickr photos could estimate snowfall levels in major cities with 95 per cent accuracy”
proved much less accurate, but Zhang puts this down to lower smartphone and social media use in rural areas. Any photos taken could still be useful for strengthening sparse satellite data, he says. Zhang presented the results at the World Wide Web conference in Lyon, France, last month, alongside data showing a similar method can detect vegetation levels. Next the team want to automatically identify the flowers and birds in Flickr photos, though this will require better computer vision techniques. Jacob Aron n
nick veasy/getty
My PC has a biodrive
form the magnetic regions on the drive, with around 100 grains corresponding to one bit. Instead of granular media, Staniland’s team produce bitHard drives based on bacteria will make today’s discs look puny patterned media. They start with a gold surface coated in chemicals in a chessboard pattern so that one set of squares binds proteins and the other repels them. They then apply the magnet-producing protein and coat the surface with an iron solution, which the protein-covered squares convert into magnetic material. As the name suggests, each magnetic square in bit-patterned media can store one bit. Each square Staniland’s team have so far produced is around 20 micrometres wide, far too bulky to store data with a density comparable to today’s hard drives. She says they now plan to test out nano-sized squares, 1000 times smaller and much closer to existing drive density. –Stuffed with stuff– Eventually, she hopes to create a hard drive with a single iron the University of Leeds, UK, have years to do all of its experiments particle per square, which will Jacob Aron borrowed a trick from nature to through evolution, so there is store as much as 1 terabyte of data COMPUTER virus destroyed your build a new kind of hard drive. almost no point in us starting per square inch – far beyond the hard drive? Don’t worry, some day Certain strains of bacteria from scratch,” says Sarah capability of most hard drives. bacteria might build you a bigger absorb iron to make magnetic Staniland, who led the research “They’ve done nice work and better one. nanoparticles that let them (Small, vol 8, p 204). showing how you can make Hard drives store data on navigate using the Earth’s Hard drives are usually made by particles on a surface,” says discs coated with a metallic magnetic field. The team have “sputtering”, in which clouds of Thomas Thomson, who studies film divided into tiny magnetic extracted the protein behind argon ions are fired at a sheet of data storage at the University of regions, each of which stores a this process and used it to create magnetic material, knocking off Manchester, UK. “But it is some single bit – the more regions you magnetic patterns that can store particles, which are deposited as a distance away from what you can squeeze on to a disc, the bigger data. “We’re using and abusing thin film on a disc. Groups would need if you were seriously the capacity. Now, researchers at nature because it’s had billions of of these particles, called grains, contemplating it as a product.” n
Snow snaps give you a better weather picture WHEN it starts snowing, start snapping. Sharing your photos online could help fill holes in satellite weather data caused by cloud cover. Haipeng Zhang, a computer scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington, and colleagues looked at 150 million photos on the website 18 | NewScientist | 5 May 2012
Flickr that had been geo-tagged in the US. First, their software analysed the image’s tags and visual features to estimate the presence of snow. Then they applied a statistical test to determine a measure of confidence in that estimate – a picture tagged with the word “snow” taken in the same location and at the same time as hundreds of non-snow pictures is unlikely to be accurate. The number of accurately identified photos in each location indicates whether or not it had snowed in that area. When compared with observations
from ground-based weather stations in New York City, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, the Flickr photos estimated snowfall with 95 per cent accuracy. This approach isn’t particularly useful in major cities, however, since we already have good data on urban snowfall. Testing the Flickr photos against nationwide satellite data
“Flickr photos could estimate snowfall levels in major cities with 95 per cent accuracy”
proved much less accurate, but Zhang puts this down to lower smartphone and social media use in rural areas. Any photos taken could still be useful for strengthening sparse satellite data, he says. Zhang presented the results at the World Wide Web conference in Lyon, France, last month, alongside data showing a similar method can detect vegetation levels. Next the team want to automatically identify the flowers and birds in Flickr photos, though this will require better computer vision techniques. Jacob Aron n