More data it used to be kept on magnetic tape and floppy disks today the world produces more than 30 zettabytes of Digital Information per year thats 30 trillion gigabytes and that number is rising each year how come we store it on c. D. s hard drives and flash drives have expected lifespans of a round 30 years. But theres a special medium that could do the trick one that has proved itself over billions of years d. N. A. They now try for tyler d. N. A. Has 2 advantages for us the data in d. N. A. Is extremely durable under the right conditions it can last around a 1000 years and the 2nd d. N. A. Is very compact you can store vast amounts of data in a tiny space by. Robert crosses a chemistry professor at e. T. H. There rick university. Together with a team of researchers hes developed a way of storing digital files like m p 3 s. All to official genetic material. The d. N. A. Molecule consists of 4 nuclear bases abbreviated to a c. T. And. The computer assigns a binary code of zeros and ones to. The d. N. A. Synthesizer creates a strand of artificial d. N. A. That the digital file is stored on and that could later be read. The person to still very complex and expensive i see Companies Like microsoft have been investing in d. N. A. Storage in 1st greece and. Then as you can volunteer data storage is Getting Better every year computers are getting faster but the physical properties that our computers currently work with cant keep valving forever at some point will reach a limit its just a matter of physics so the industry is looking beyond the principles of physics and into things like biology and chemistry and what principles that are out there that could be used to store data and when you think about it d. N. A. Is the answer. Dauphine. Them assistance or believe in luck. D. N. A. Is especially interesting as a long term storage solution. Because humans will always be interested in analyzing their own genetic material the devices that read d. N. A. A very unlikely to become obsolete. D. N. A. Can also last a very long time under the right conditions samples of ancient fossils and mammoths frozen in permafrost have shown that the molecules can stay intact for thousands of years. The problem is the d. N. A. Only remains stable if the bones samples have been perfectly preserved. Even in the laboratory a d. N. A. Molecule decays after just a few months and then losing the solution we have is a kind of artificial fossil basically trying to create the equivalent of a bone. A bone is a piece of calcium phosphate with d. N. A. Inside it and what were working on is a small glass beads with strands of d. N. A. Inside. The in austria and parked in. The d. N. A. Should last up to a 1000 years preserved in glass the pizza so small they can only be seen under an electron microscope. Each beat contains about 10 killer bytes of data about 2 pages of the book with us is a can almost see the truth of what you can see in this image is about 20 or 30 pages of a book of beauty but remember these particles are at 200000 times magnification human if they really are incredibly small. So if you have 20 or 30 pages here and we zoom out a bit then you have a whole book on the screen. And a bit further out and its not like that now you have the whole floor of the library got some stock in front of people to take on to not if you go even further out you have billions of these tiny beats so you have a whole library on something the size of a speck of dust and from there theyre constantly taking a poke because. Right now they can only store a few 100 megabytes in this way so a lot more development is needed before we have a whole library stored in t. N. A. We have the perfect storage device in our body nearly every cell has the blueprint of life in its nucleus quote up in the form of chromosomes. D. N. A. It stores characteristics like gender for i and hair color and everywhere we go we leave traces of it behind at a crime scene its like a calling card left by the perpetrator. Blood. Sperm. Saliva the sources detectors often look for to provide d. N. A. Samples. But a crime scene can provide valuable traces of d. N. A. On practically any object. Nowadays touching something. Just once can leave enough genetic material for investigators to analyze. At the institute of forensic medicine in the swiss city of burn around 4 and 5 are the analyses that geneticists studio but its curious out in her lab involves samples left by casual contact socalled touch d. N. A. That a contact. With touch d. N. A. You can get a range of results from a good profile to an unusable one but weve reached the point where we can create a genetic profile from just 10 to 20 cells. Since the early days in the development of d. N. A. Profiling 35 years ago the amounts of genetic material needed to get a result have fallen steadily. Every cell nucleus in the body contains a persons entire genome packed into 23 pairs of chromosomes. Half of your d. N. A. Comes from your mother and the other half is from your father forensic investigators compare stretches of d. N. A. They can vary widely from individual to individual segments that dont encode for genes the trick is to 1st make millions of copies of the d. N. A. Under examination thats what enables even tiny traces of d. N. A. To be analyzed. At a crime scene there may be thousands of touch d. N. A. Samples. Like on the wine glass in this scene. The bottle has been touched by several people. And the knife may have been used by a friend of the victim. Separating all those strands is a lot of work for so dio but her analyses using modern methods often produce inconclusive d. N. A. Profiles to illustrate these 2 peaks are typical of a clear fingerprint from a blood sample but an average touch d. N. A. Sample looks quite different with many smaller peaks that indicate it contains d. N. A. From several people that often makes the result unusable makes a thing their own mind you often wish for a clearer picture. Sometimes so you see d. N. A. And the profile from a person who has nothing to do with the crime. Such false d. N. A. Positives have confused a number of cases like this one the same d. N. A. Was identified at 35 separate crime scenes it appeared that one woman had been committing crimes for 15 years burglary theft even murder investigators searched for her feverish lee but a few months later they had to admit the notorious phantom was just that. The criminal mastermind didnt exist the d. N. A. Was that of a worker in a medical Equipment Company whose job it was to package cotton swabs for crime scenes. That contamination lead officials astray for 15 years if. Of course we try to avoid contamination. But thats very difficult due to the High Sensitivity of the tests so were all registered in the database to the. D. N. A. Profiling can now even predict physical traits that result from specific genes including characteristics like hair or eye color sylvia lets has decided to try the new analysis method shes eager to see what it can deliver. The geneticist profiled her own d. N. A. And that of 2 coworkers. According to the analysis test subjects number one has a blond hair with a probability of 54 percent. And brown eyes likelihood 70 percent. Number 2 is blonde with only a 68 percent probability. And an 89 percent chance of being blueeyed well thats right at least. Sylvia says blond hair is predicted and her blue eyes with high probability. The geneticist says the test works most reliably for people with complection that are either very fair or very dark. Oh. I think i color can be a clue if the passed in hospital with alcoa is i see how color it more critically how can be done right and it can turn gray it changes over the course of a lifetime exactly how is the subject to research at the moment there are studies going on look its a number of characteristics including for skin color of the Hat Properties like curly or straight to the heart lung. And in the coming years traces of d. N. A. At crime scenes are likely to provide more information even predicting the shape of a suspect face some researchers think a complete identikit damage could be on the cards. I color is just the beginning. Did you learn that the ability to roll your tongue is hereditary its a popular belief that although there may be a genetic component you can learn to roll your tongue. But i am hair color are genetically determined. On facebook we asked what youve inherited from your parents. Elvira writes that she inherited her curls and the characteristic color of her skin. Pedro says that he has eyebrows and a mole from his father and his right eye comes from his mother with a slightly drooping eyelids. Marionette inherited flat feet shortsightedness and clear skin from her parents. And luis mentions green eyes and yellow teeth which he calls dog teeth blond hair and caucasian skin thanks to all of you for writing in. Before were born its pretty clear what were going to look like. But over the course of evolution our genes have adapted to the environment. One study says that our nose shape has adapted to the climate with warm humid areas leading to wider nostrils and a cold climate to more narrow ones but are we as good as it gets. There are plenty of features that dont make us look so good. Human beings some of us think were great pinnacle of evolution not. Really. We might have High Performance springs for instance but theyre also extremely dependent on oxygen a construction flaw that can quickly become. Fatal. Our evolution through the ianthe has left our eyes with a blind spot and they see the world upside down our brains have to invert the image to compensate. And our jaws shrunk so starkly over time theyve become too small for all of our teeth fortunately we have braces to correct that and line them all up again. Our windpipes branching straight off from the esophagus leaving us in constant danger of choking on our food. And that was just the head and neck and by no means the entire story. On the other hand life is only as diverse and varied as it is precisely because of the flaws. Because every time an organism reproduces something can go wrong and over the course of evolution thats led to a string of new life forms with new characteristics and abilities. Eventual he we humans emerged with all our inadequacies. Like our backs we inherited our backbones from fish 500000000 years ago they needed something to attach their muscle tissues to the birth of the spine. In the weightlessness of the primordial oceans brilliant innovation but far too weak for life on dry land. Yet another flaw that was never ironed out. Throughout the ages weve been passing this flaw along with myriads of others from generation to generation. And even though reproduction is very much hit and miss. The main reason for that is our upright stance 1st evolved about 3 and a half 1000000 years ago for that our pelvises had to shrink to avoid walking along and to have us walk tall and still. No doubt it looks better. But for reproduction its a real problem because the human pelvis and birth canal are now so narrow childbirth is a painful procedure. And our children arrive only partly developed small and helpless. A large part of their brains development can only take place after birth in engineering terms the human model can only be labelled a complete failure. But evolution doesnt care about perfection rather its all about change and diversity and thats why its natural for us all to be flawed something that also makes each one of us unique. Our d. N. A. Provides the maybe not entirely perfect blueprint each of our parents gave us half of their genes but that doesnt mean d. N. A. Has to dictate our lives. The influence of the environment on animals and humans is the subject of Intense Research and many studies show that physical activity has a huge influence on our bodies development at any age. This elderly mouse is showing just how closely movement and balance are related it runs up to 10 kilometers a day. But this mouse of the same age has never been allowed on a treadmill. Comparing the sedentary mouse with that sporty colleague tells a lot about the effects of movement on balance. And its likely that humans respond in a similar way. With the music. The mice are exercising without specifically addressing coordination or balance its purely in durance training and we really didnt expect it to have such a powerful effect a fake the time i heard of all. The researchers at the center for Molecular Life Sciences at the university of basel in switzerland were very impressed by the speed the old mouse it had only started training on the treadmill 6 weeks before the balance tests before that it had been a sedentary as its body what happened in that period the initial clue came from a look at neurons in the spinal cords of mice that exercised in ones that didnt as well as young mice. Christopher hunch in steam found that the exercise caused rapid regeneration of nerve and muscle cells. The muscles are controlled by motor neurons their colored purple here. Theyre connected to vista be a learner on scene here in green their nerve cells in the brain and in her ear that are linked to balance. Wasnt it looks 8 on the left here you can see the image of a young mouse here is the motor neuron and as you can see it has a lot of contact points with the wrist to their neurons. In the meet in the middle we have the image of an elderly mouse that hadnt been exercising and i think its pretty obvious that there are far fewer green spots and on the right we have the image of an elderly mouse thats done exercise there are many more green points in evidence here so the older mouse that exercise looks like the young mouse. On sheen says that the changes are down to exercise even in old age. It was what were demonstrating and there are studies on humans as well is that exercise helps even if you dont start till youre older anything is better than doing nothing and its never too late to get. At another lab at the university of basel mice are running around to their Hearts Content and their muscular activity has astounding effects as well they develop new cells in the brain that may not be a New Discovery but now the researchers have shown. Additional nerve cells improve the precision of that memory capability that. The ability to remember requires highly flexible cells that can quickly store precise information in the brain things like. Where did i put that key again. What was it i wanted to buy. Where they parked my car. Use official baggers team tested the still active cells from the brain of a sporty mouse. These were cells that had only just been formed. These young cells that had just developed were more easily excited that neighboring older cells. And they also established fresh connections with other cells faster than the older ones did active newly formed cells perfect for Crystal Clear memory and experiment with these objects was used to show if mice that had been exercising really did have better memories than their peers bischof bagger confronted an active mouse and a more sedentary mouse with 2 identical objects mice like new things and investigate them by sniffing. A day later he replaced one object with something similar. Only the fit mouse recognized it was new and sniffed it more intensely. The mouse that had not exercised couldnt tell the difference between the 2 objects only once bishop beggar had replaced the White Pyramid with a black one did the un sporty now see the object as something new and begin to investigate it. So it seems that active mice have a more precise memory thanks to the new brain cells form to exercise. But there is a catch when its and a new can if the cells on tuesday they die off again within a matter of weeks. So it will take both physical and mental exercise to keep mice and people on their toes. Get out. Red white flag and even. Now its your part of the show if you have a science question just ask send it to us as a video text or voice mail if we answer it on the show youll get a little surprise so just ask you this time we have a cosmic question sent in by a viewer in ghana. How fast is the universe expanding. In 1929 the american astronomer edwin hubble made a groundbreaking discovery. He could found early observations that the light from distant galaxies is more redshifted the light from closer ones. That means that distant objects are moving away from us faster than the closer ones. This led hubble to conclude that the universe is expanding. It all started around 14000000000 years ago with a big bang and ever since the universe has been growing all of its mass with all of its gravitational pull couldnt overpower the force of the expansion of the galaxies that formed continue to grow further and further apart like the raisins in a rising. The rate of the expansion is known as the hubble constant its such a key concept in cosmology we want to know it as precisely as possible the European Space agencys planck satellite measured radiation from the Early Universe and determined that for every megaparsecs or 3300000 light years further away a galaxy is its receding 6070 kilometers per 2nd faster but more recently the Hubble Space Telescope examined nearby galaxies and came up with a higher expansion rate of 74 kilometers per 2nd per 2nd based. Scrap and see still needs to be explained. Many physicists believe but these glimpses into the cosmos show that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing. Some us astrophysicists have simulated what would happen if the expansion were to keep accelerating. In this scenario known as the big rip the entire fabric of space time would be torn apart galaxies stars planets even atoms the universe as we know it would cease to exist. To feel radically that is fortunately this scenario is very improbable. So keep those questions coming heres how to get in touch on our website twitter or facebook. And thats all for now next time we get into micro plastics theyre everywhere and theyre said to be very harmful is that true what are the effects of micro plastics find out next week till then take care and see you soon. Film manager. Shows things in a different light. To treat. It invent it see it and see this dissolve in space into endlessness. One of the greatest artists of our time james to balance how against on. Being 30 minutes on d w. I think in everything challenging 1st on how to make a muslim. Song much different culture between here and there so a challenge in court if the thing. Finish on a 7 year was worth it for me to come to germany. Which obviously got my license to work as a swimming instructor up to shine our 2 children 100. 00 just one of us to just discuss. Whats your story take part share it on info migrants dot net. Hundreds often use in life clubs. Where i come from raj your demands an important soft transmitting news and information and when i was young my country was in brawling each conference. So more people more. People would cause them. To see. If ones mind took 2 in one off the lot and just say its sold out to everyone in that column. And listen to those up to be. Intrinsic to my ignore enjoy. More design. Even if its not the. Most its one of. My choices to scott because even though were told transmitted to the troops. Men in the grass mom much and i will. Get up. And. This is news live from berlin a big win for ukraines president in snap elections exit polls to pull out and theres a lot skis party to win some 44 percent of the vote but is that enough support to help him deliver on ambitious performance that agenda is good enough to trump also coming up. Protests turned violent