You Can Squeeze 2.2 Petabytes of Data Into One Gram of DNA

Scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute are squeezing unparalleled amounts of data in to synthetic DNA, and now they've achieved something absolutely amazing: they can store 2.2 petabytes of information in a single gram of DNA, and recover it with 100 percent accuracy.

The researchers have encoded an MP3 of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream" speech, along with all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, into a string of DNA. Scaled up, that represents a storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram. What's amazing, though, is that they've managed to achieve that whilst also implementing error correction in the complex chains of molecules, allowing them to retrieve content with 100 per cent accuracy.

The technique uses the four bases of DNA—A, T, C and G—to achieve the high information density. It is, understandably, still incredibly expensive: creating synthetic DNA and then sequencing it to read off the data is getting far easier, but it's still a time- and cash-consuming business. Keep hold of your hard drives for now, but DNA could represent a viable storage solution in the future. More here.

Would You Wear These Crazy Shoes?

These sneakers are, according to Reebok, the "the first all-terrain athletic shoe". They're supposed to echo the utility of an all-terrain vehicle, and take mud, snow, grass, and sand in their stride. But let's not ignore the fact that they look completely and utterly weird.

In many ways they have all the trappings of a normal sneaker: padded tongue, supportive collar for ankle protection, nicely breathable upper and... oh my God look at those lugged soles.

These things seem to be designed to make the wearer look like a clown. Or a space explorer. Perhaps even an alien. They were certainly not designed to make you look normal. More here.

It’s Impossible To Wake Up Grumpy With This Sunny Silicone Egg Mold

No matter how bad your morning is going, this adorable $12 Sunnyside egg mold is sure to brighten your day—unless you're some kind of monster. Its clever design traps and holds an egg's yolk so it cooks in the shape of the sun, while the egg whites are free to flow and solidify into the shape of a fluffy cloud.

Just add some bacon seagulls, and maybe some hash brown mountains, and you've got yourself a picture perfect breakfast. More here.

Nobody Would See You Coming on This Beautiful Transparent Bike

From certain angles you can barely see this beautiful bicycle—because it's made from the same strong, lighthtweight and transparent plastic used in fighter jet canopies. It's the perfect stealth bike.

A concept put together by Designaffairs, this bicycle—aptly called Clarity Bike—is built from a polymer called Trivex. First used in helicopter windscreens and then in fighter jet canopies, the material is incredibly light but can withstand major shocks. It's also resistant to extremes of heat and cold, and can be injection moulded—so it would be perfect for making a bicycle.Designaffairs explain:

We believe that the Clarity Bike could be a giant leap forward in bicycle frame engineering and production. The design takes advantage of an advanced polymer which combines high impact resistance, lightweight properties and a gentle flexibility that usually would only be expected on an old Italian steel frame.

If this thing could be made affordably, they could sell an absolute ton—and I, for one, would be at the front of the queue. More here.

The Mathematically Most Efficient Way to Sort Socks

Computer scientists around the world have been stumped by a vexing mathematical problem for ages: How does one go about sorting a large pile of socks when said socks are different? How does one model the plane of possibilities? The solution has arrived, and it's much simpler than you think.

Mr. Kottke reports the findings of his own personal study, which it turns out is simpler than anything science has otherwise come up with. More here.

1) Throw all your socks out.

2) Go to Uniqlo and buy 15 identical pairs of black socks.

3) When you want to wear socks, pick any two out of the drawer.

4) When you notice your socks are wearing out, goto step 1.

Suction Cup Viewfinder Makes Your iPhone Slightly More DSLR-Like

If you're a professional photographer who's reluctantly embraced the iPhone as an occasional alternative to your DSLR, you're gonna love Photojojo's latest smartphone accessory. It's a suction cup viewfinder that sticks your iPhone's display letting you block out all the distractions around you and frame your shots the same way you would with your full-sized camera.

For $30 it includes a complementary app that generates a smaller preview window on the iPhone's display that the viewfinder is designed to cover, as well as an easy on-screen guide so you know exactly where to position it. It even works with iPads, as long as you're willing to deal with everyone around you shaking their head in disbelief while you hold your giant tablet up against your face. More here.

Who Cares If They’re Probably Impractical? These Wooden Knives Are Stunning

There's probably a good reason the master knife makers of the world traditionally choose steel and other metals for their blades, instead of maple. But even if these wooden knives, designed by The Federal, aren't as durable or lack the heft of a traditional blade, they'd still make a gorgeous addition to any kitchen, particularly one sporting a butcher block counter.

So that the knives are safe to use on foods, easy to clean, and won't become visible histories of the meals you've prepared through stains, the wood is sealed . And the thin steel edge that serves as the blade is actually about twice as wide as it appears, with the opposing side invisibly sliding into the wooden part of the blade where it's secured with flush-mounted rivets. More here.

A 3D-Printed Hamburger Would Cost You $300,000

Making fake meat in a lab sure isn't easy, but 3D printing promises to revolutionize the process. The only downside: a 3D-printed hamburger will set you back $300,000.

Growing meat in the lab is a long-studied avenue of research. But now 3D printing could make the process quicker. The BBC explains:

Instead of traditional ink or a material like plastic, the 3D printer cartridge contains something called bioink made of hundreds of thousands of live cells. Once printed in the desired shape, the bioink particles naturally fuse to form living tissue. This process of bioprinting biomaterials is similar to attempts to print artificial organs for transplants - but the result could well end up in your frying pan.

The real benefit is related to the shape of the meat we eat, though: burgers, steaks and plenty of other cuts have lateral dimensions that are much bigger than their thickness. That makes them perfect candidates for 3D printing, which could theoretically speed up the process of making lab-grown meat. But just like the devices used for prototyping products using plastics, bio-printing is still in its infancy—and so incredibly expensive.

So while there's certainly promise—after all, a Dutch team has already showcased a small piece of 3D-printed artificial meat which was 2cm long, 1cm wide and about 1mm thick—current estimates suggest a whole hamburger created in this way would cost $300,000. Not quite competing with McDonald's yet, then. More here.

Google’s Making Moves to Kill the Password

Passwords are long and complicated and hard to remember. And that's only if they're good passwords. No matter how you slice it, passwords are annoying and on top of that, they're not even all that secure. Google knows that all too well, and it's pushing for the next big thing. A ring maybe. Like for your finger.

Google's been getting behind two-step verification for a while, and although that's more secure than a standard password, it's also more annoying. Hardly a perfect solution. In a paper to be published later this month in IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, Google's President of Security Eric Grosse and Engineer Mayank Upadhyay are pitching alternatives like cryptographic card for your USB, or some kind of (presumably NFC) ring.

Google's got some software in the making that'd allow this kind of stuff to log you into a browser without involving any sort of software in the middle, just you and your browser. But even in the best possible future, it won't kill passwords completely. So long as your little key can be separated from you, you'll have to have a PIN or something, and the more conveniently short the PIN, the more important it is you don't loose that key. Still, it beats straight passwords and two-step verification annoyances. And the sooner the password can finally be laid to rest, the better. More here.

Kim Dotcom’s Mega Is Now Open To the Public

Mega, Kim Dotcom's big, flashy new copyright-dismantling file-sharing/storage site with encryption up the wazoo has finally launched. You can head on over and sign up right now. That is, so long as the site can hold under the crazy traffic. So far, it looks like it's getting crushed. But different people are experiencing different things.

Angled Lens Case Turns Your Smartphone Into a GoPro

G-Form's made a name for itself with extreme phone and tablet cases that can protect a gadget during falls from over 100,000 feet. But since rarely are any of us in a situation where we fumble and drop our toys from space, the company's new G90 case that turns your phone into a GoPro-like action cam is a little more exciting.

The case is of course completely waterproof, and designed to protect your device against falls, collisions, and other run-ins with gravity. But it's biggest innovation is a 90-degree angled lens and mirror that makes it easier to mount your protected phone length-wise. It's a more aerodynamic approach, and the larger lens also expands your smartphone camera's view to a full 140 degrees, depending on its own lens.

Expected to drop—safely—in June, the G90 will actually be available for a wide variety of devices including the iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S4 (oh really?), and even the latest iPod Touch. More here.

Ticking Teeth Skull Watch Walks the Line Between Clever and Morbid

Skull-based accessories are usually only popular with a certain demographic who've embraced the morbid side of life. But damned if this Last Laugh watch from Mr. Jones hasn't crossed the border into mainstream territories with a clever mechanism that shows the hour and minutes on the skull's teeth.

Powered by an automatic mechanical movement that basically means just wearing the watch keeps it wound, the Last Laugh is a little pricey at $260 for what is essentially a clever sight gag. More here.

A 3D Printer That Actually Looks Like it Belongs in Your Home

Cubify's colorful 3D printers look like coffee makers, and that's exactly the point—they're a natural fit for your home. And they might be just the ticket to making this 3D printing thing stick with normal people.

The Cube is kind of the opposite of Makerbot's at-home 3D printer, the Replicator, which is a big bulky 32-pound industrial beast. The Cube, on the other hand, is a 19-pound, adorable sewing machine-sized apparatus, and it's totally something that fits right in with your other appliances. To top it off, it's $1400, compared to the Replicator's $1750 starting point. For $50 more you get Cubify's design software to make the printable creations of your dreams. (Real talk: They should include the software for free.)

As a company, Cubify might actually have the right understanding—its founder, Chuck Hull, was actually the first person to patent a 3D printer all the way back in 1983. Though it took him a good 30 years to have a product on the market, the Cube looks really promising. More here.

Patent Hints at Laser-Controlled Google Glasses

With Google's Project Glass still very much in its awkward developmental stages, the best method of controlling it remains up for debate. This patent, though, suggests that a laser-projected control pad might be in the running.

Currently, Project Glass uses a touch pad that runs down the side of one of its arms. Trouble is, that means reaching up every time you need to adjust a setting. This idea, though, would use a laser projector to throw a control pad onto any surface that you're looking at: wall, desk, arm, whatever. Then, a small camera would interpret finger movements in the region of those buttons and turn them into commands. Simple.

This is well-trodden ground, of course: there have been oh-so-many laser projectors designed to throw a keyboard onto a desk in front of you. But they were static; Google's offering would be much trickier to pull off and use. More here.

There Are Easier Ways to Stack Chairs, But Come On: These Are Awesome

These new chairs by designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance disassemble for storage. No, this isn't the most efficient way to stow furniture away, but it's a neat idea.

Instead of folding up, the "Market" chair's curtain of slats rolls up like a blanket, leaving the frame bare so that it'll fit neatly together with another. If you want chairs that simply stack, you can stick to aluminum. More here.

Vacuums Double as Ponytail-Making Machines

Dads of the world, take note: you don't have to leave the hairstyling to mom. Got a vacuum? Great. Got one of those snakey tube attachments? Perfect. Pop a rubber band on that bad boy, suck your daughter's hair up in the tube, and voilà! A perfect ponytail. Cue touchdown dance.

Be careful, though. One false move and, instead of a cleanly coifed child, you could have a very bald, very upset kid on your hands. Regardless, whoever thought of this is dad of the year. More here.

Apple Stock Hits a Nine Month Low

Apple's stock took a sharp jump downwards at the opening bell this morning, continuing the rough slide it's been on since the last quarter of 2012. The stock is currently trading around $488 a share. Back in September of 2012, at its peak price of $705 a share, Apple was far and away the world's most valuable company, a crowning achievement for a company that had its share of dark days in the 1990s. But with the loss of its iconic leader, Steve Jobs, and recent flubs on software such as new Maps app, investors seem to have lost much of their confidence in Apple.

"The company has never traded on its profit, it's the exact opposite of Amazon," said trader and Stocktwits founder Howard Lindzon. "Apple has been rewarded for its innovation. The market is expecting more magic. Apple is kind of stuck, for a company that executes so flawlessly. They are printing money, and the market doesn't care." More here.

Coffee or Tea? Don’t Choose Because This Cup Is Two-Faced

If you didn't get your flu shot, you might fall victim to what has now actually turned into an epidemic. And that means you'll temporarily trade your morning coffee in for a steady drip of tea. But fear not, this reversible cup suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning it's appropriate for whichever hot beverage you prefer.

Depending which way you look at it (literally), the adorable little mug looks like either a tea cup or a coffee mug. For $18 you're basically getting two adorable mugs—a wonderfully indecisive accessory for indecisive people. More here.

This Is What a Virus Infecting a Cell Looks Like

This isn't a cartoon tree or some strange piece of modern art. In fact, it's what researchers from the University of Texas at Austin saw when they managed to observe a virus in the act of penetrating a cell.

In the image, you can see a T7 virus (red) burrowing its way into an E. coli bacterium (green). The six yellow strands are actually rudimentary legs, which allow the virus to crawl over cells to find a weak spot and then infect them.

The image is the first time scientists have observed a virus inserting its tail into a cell to infect it. It's believed that the process allows it to infect a cell directly with its DNA. The weirdest part? The fact that this all happens in your body, too. More here.

The World’s Tiniest Clock Is Just One Atom

Holger Muller, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, and his colleagues were interested in breaking down time-telling to its simplest possible forms, and a single-atom clock seemed like a good place to start. The whole concept relies on Broglie's matter-wave hypothesis, which states that a particle of matter can behave like a wave. That means it'll oscillate in a normal pattern that can be used as a clock.

It's not quite that simple though; a single atom will oscillate too fast to be read. So the researchers basically split a cesium atom in half, and had one half move back and forth. Because this movement dilated the oscillation of that half, and the scientists knew exactly how they'd disrupted the atom, they were able to use all the data to calculate the oscillation of the original atom, and essentially make a single atom clock out of it.

A one-atom clock is awesome, but not exactly great at its job. It's only about as accurate as the first atomic clocks, and one billion times less so than the nuclear clocks we have today. Still, it's an impressive accomplishment. More here.