Existing data storage methods can't keep up with the amount of data we need to store, so Microsoft is creating a fully automated data-to-DNA storage system as a solution.

Microsoft says we're soon going to be faced with a bit of a data storage crisis. We are producing so much data that we're going to reach a point where there's more data than storage available. To solve this impending problem, Microsoft is turning to DNA.

According to Seagate, in 2018 we created 33 zettabytes of data, but by 2025 that will have grown to 175 zettabytes. Hard drives continue to grow in capacity, but even if they did manage to keep up with demand they require a lot of physical storage space and cooling, meaning datacenters will need to expand. DNA, on the other hand, can store data "in a space that's orders of magnitude smaller than datacenters," but we need to figure out how to automate the data-to-DNA process and to do so cheaply.

A team of researchers at Microsoft working with the University of Washington believe they have taken the first step towards doing just that. A proof-of-concept test successfully demonstrated "the first fully automated system to store and retrieve data in manufactured DNA."

Neptune has a new storm, in the form of a large dark spot that appeared in late 2018. By analyzing Hubble images dating back to 2015, astronomers have discovered high-altitude clouds that formed years ahead of the visible storm, indicating it was already forming there, swirling beneath the clouds and haze. The telltale clouds are teaching astronomers more about how such storms form and evolve on all the giant outer planets.

Birth of a Storm

Neptune, like all the outer solar system planets, forms large and durable storms. While Jupiter's Great Red Spot is infamous, Neptune's dark blue spots were unknown until Voyager 2 flew past in 1989, sending back pictures of two large storms on its surface. Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been visible for at least 190 years, and possibly since the 1600s. But when Hubble peered at Neptune in 1994, its storms had already vanished.

Since then, Hubble has spotted dark storms appearing and disappearing on Neptune, lasting only two years or so - though maybe up to six years - before dissipating again. Like hurricanes on steroids, Neptune's storms are dark vortexes of clouds racing at high speeds, each roughly the size of planet Earth. But Earth storms rarely last more than a few weeks, and form around low-pressure areas. On the giant planets, they instead form around regions of high-pressure.

"That makes them more stable to start," says Simon. "And there are no land masses. That's what breaks storms up on Earth." On Jupiter, the planet's jet streams lock its massive storm in place near the equator, where it has safely churned for centuries. On Neptune, wind patterns push the storms north or south where they get shredded by opposing wind currents within a few years.

Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special interview with Stephen Meyer is up and viewable now at YouTube. This might be the best interview with Meyer that I've ever seen. Check it out:


Why might it be the best? Partly because of the long video format - a full hour (with a provocative final question for Steve that you need to subscribe to The Daily Wire to see), and very well produced. Partly because Shapiro has done his homework. He knows the common challenges to intelligent design and poses them very articulately, and he's obviously absorbed Meyer's books, especially Darwin's Doubt and Signature in the Cell, as well other material on ID. That is more than you can say for some scientists and journalists I'm thinking of right now.

A South Korean government panel has concluded that a magnitude-5.4 earthquake that struck the city of Pohang on 15 November 2017 was probably caused by an experimental geothermal power plant. The panel was convened under presidential orders and released its findings on 20 March.

Unlike conventional geothermal plants, which extract energy directly from hot underground water or rock, the Pohang power plant injected fluid at high pressure into the ground to fracture the rock and release heat - a technology known as an enhanced geothermal system. This pressure caused small earthquakes that affected nearby faults, and eventually triggered the bigger 2017 quake, the panel found.

The quake was the nation's second strongest and its most destructive on modern record - it injured 135 people and caused an estimated 300 billion won (US$290 million) in damage. The nation's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, which had provided funding for the plant, said in a statement that it accepts the panel's findings and "expresses deep regret" to the citizens of Pohang who were harmed by the event.

A Japanese spacecraft studying the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu beamed home new data revealing that the space rock has less water than scientists expected.

The spacecraft, Hayabusa2, arrived at Ryugu on June 27, 2018. Since then, the probe has surveyed the asteroid's surface and landed multiple robotic probes on its rocky terrain.

Last month, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) completed a complicated touchdown maneuver to collect samples from Ryugu's surface, which will be brought back to Earth in a return capsule in late 2020.

After almost a year surveying Ryugu, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft has already collected invaluable data that may help scientists better understand the early solar system.

It is a truth universally acknowledged among virologists that a single virus, carrying a full set of genes, must be in want of a cell. A virus is just a collection of genes packaged into a capsule. It infiltrates and hijacks a living cell to make extra copies of itself. Those daughter viruses then bust out of their ailing host, and each finds a new cell to infect. Rinse, and repeat. This is how all viruses, from Ebola to influenza, are meant to work.

But Stéphane Blanc and his colleagues at the University of Montpellier have shown that one virus breaks all the rules.

Faba bean necrotic stunt virus, or FBNSV for short, infects legumes, and is spread through the bites of aphids. Its genes are split among eight segments, each of which is packaged into its own capsule. And, as Blanc's team has now shown, these eight segments can reproduce themselves, even if they infect different cells. FBNSV needs all of its components, but it doesn't need them in the same place. Indeed, this virus never seems to fully come together. It is always distributed, its existence spread between capsules and split among different host cells.

"This is truly a revolutionary result in virology," says Siobain Duffy of Rutgers University, who wasn't involved in the study. "Once again, viruses prove that they've had the evolutionary time to try just about every reproductive strategy, even ones that are hard for scientists to imagine."

Two deadly crashes involving Boeing's newest airplane in less than six months puts in jeopardy not only the credibility of the manufacturer, but also new technologies actively being pushed by the world's top tech firms.

All Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes operated by global carriers were grounded earlier this month after an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft crashed shortly after take-off, taking a steep nosedive not far from Nairobi.

The fatal accident which claimed 157 lives followed a similar crash in Indonesia, which killed all 189 people on board in October.

The two crashes appear to have something in common. The crews of both aircraft reportedly struggled with the MAX 8 autopilot system which pointed the nose of the airplane down before the crash.

New research from Washington University in St. Louis explains the cellular processes that allow a sun-loving microbe to "eat" electricity-transferring electrons to fix carbon dioxide to fuel its growth.

Led by Arpita Bose, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and Michael Guzman, a Ph.D. candidate in her laboratory, a Washington University team showed how a naturally occurring strain of Rhodopseudomonas palustris takes up electrons from conductive substances like metal oxides or rust. The work is described in a March 22 paper in the journal Nature Communications.

The study builds on Bose's previous discovery that R. palustris TIE-1 can consume electrons from rust proxies like poised electrodes, a process called extracellular electron uptake. R. palustris is phototrophic, which means that it uses energy from light to carry out certain metabolic processes. The new research explains the cellular sinks where this microbe dumps the electrons it eats from electricity.

A "mindblowing" haul of fossils that captures the riot of evolution that kickstarted the diversity of life on Earth more than half a billion years ago has been discovered by researchers in China.

Paleontologists found thousands of fossils in rocks on the bank of the Danshui river in Hubei province in southern China, where primitive forms of jellyfish, sponges, algae, anemones, worms and arthropods with thin whip-like feelers were entombed in an ancient underwater mudslide.

The creatures are so well preserved in the fossils that the soft tissues of their bodies, including the muscles, guts, eyes, gills, mouths and other openings are all still visible. The 4,351 separate fossils excavated so far represent 101 species, 53 of them new.

Recently in the journal Evolution, two of my colleagues in the Lehigh University Department of Biological Sciences published a seven-page critical review of Darwin Devolves. As I'll show below, it pretty much completely misses the mark. Nonetheless, it is a good illustration of how sincere-yet-perplexed professional evolutionary biologists view the data, as well as how they see opposition to their views, and so it is a possible opening to mutual understanding. This is the first of a three-part reply.

I'd like to begin by enthusiastically affirming that the co-authors of the review, Greg Lang and Amber Rice, are terrific young scientists. Greg's research is on the experimental laboratory evolution of yeast, and he's an associate editor at the Journal of Molecular Evolution. Amber studies the evolutionary effects of the hybridization of two species of chickadee, and she's an associate editor for Evolution. Not surprisingly, the review is well written and the authors have done a lot of homework, not only reading the book itself but also digging into other material I have written and relevant literature. What's more, Greg and Amber are both salt-of-the-earth folks, cheerful, friendly, and great colleagues. The additional Lehigh people they cite in the Acknowledgements section share all those qualities. There is no reason for anyone to take any of the remarks in their review as anything other than their best honest professional opinions of the matter. So let's get to the substance of the review.

"Two Critical Errors of Logic"

After introductory remarks, Lang and Rice begin by deferring to the review of my book in Science and a follow-up web post to show that the book contains "a few factual errors and many errors of omission." (I along with others have dealt at length with those already; see here, here, here, here, here, and here) Instead, in their own review they focus on what they see as two logical errors of the book: 1) that I wrongly equate "the prevalence of loss of function mutations to the inevitable degradation of biological systems and the impossibility of evolution to produce novelty"; and 2) that I wrongly confuse proteins with machines, and use that misguided metaphor to mislead readers. I'll take those two points and their many subparts mostly in turn.