It feels like everyone's searching for the secret to living longer these days. Better health, sharper minds, stronger bodies. This is the John T. and the Doc podcast.
I'm Dr. Marcus Rani, and I'm joined by someone who understands performance and resilience better than most, international cricketer, John T. Rose. In this show, we explore the science of longevity, from how our bodies age, to the everyday habits that help us stay strong, sharp, and resilient as the years go by.
Catch full episodes on the IBM podcast's YouTube channel, and on all audio streaming platforms. Hello, Simplifieders. Oh, so now we have a collective noun for people listening to the show. Well, I wanted to make any suggestions.
A gullible of Simplified listeners. Wasn't HITRO called a collective noun for a large group of people who are about to get screwed or something? Yeah, true. So we need a collective noun for a small but growing set of people who are about to become smarter.
A school of Simplified listeners? No, no, but it needs to become ostensibly smarter, very little input. Oh, an MBA of Simplified listeners. That sounds right.
There we go. So, hello, MBA of listeners. Which is now what we're going to collectively call an MBA of listeners. And welcome to the foremost podcast whose epicenter is in Valar.
We are your jolly hosts. I'm CK. And I'm Chuck. Most of the four jokes on this podcast are mine.
And I'm the name. I bring worldly wisdom and good looks and... In case you're joining us for the first time, guys, Simplified is a show that deconstructs things that happen around you, simplifies them in language that you can understand, and take the practical upshot and impress people with your knowledge. Along the way, there are likely to be several bad jokes, PC Woodhouse references, and hey, this paragraph is there, we're back in one Wikipedia also.
Thanks, I wrote it. We should start this week by celebrating the major success of Digital India. This is the time when a man who besieged Hindu men to raid the dead bodies of Muslim women became the CM of India's most important electoral state. So we needed something light to take your minds off that horrible fact, and levity came in form of a spoiled hard disk.
Not just any hard disk, but one containing data of corrupt officials. Just like that, the CVC's website crashes. Central vigilance. Is this something like how there was a fire in Mantra, like conveniently, but unfortunately burned, only those RTI documents that connected with the fire in that floor.
Very specifically, that it was a vector-based fire. You can argue that this is a way more eco-friendly and cheap method, actually, to get rid of data than like a fire. Before, there was a damage of half a floor, noxious gases, all the cleaning up and all that. Here, all that needed was a fresh C-gate that's sorted from Amazon.
Lower ecological footprint. Hard disk drives, though, are terribly similar to politicians. They have a life cycle of around four years and are superingly prone to corruption. Brilliant.
So I wanted to see why hard disk drives get spoiled. There are several, actually, reasons. Manufacturer faults, problems with danuos, heat, improper ventilation, heat can damage the internal moving parts, power surges, or corrupted fires, but the one that could be the most frustrating is mechanical failure, because chances of recovery are super slim and very expensive if this happens. Your hard disk drive won't detect, and there are random noises coming from the disk.
Yeah, I can relate to this, because a couple of years back, my priced hard drive on which I store all my photos, like since 2002, 2003, whatever, from the time I had a digital camera, that drive got corrupted. And as it happens, I had lost the hard drive that had the backup, and I had no choice, because it was not music that I could re-download, or TV shows I could re-download, or documents which had served their purpose after being sent to a client and put him to sleep. This was actually all my photos, all my memories, and many of these were not backed up on Facebook and things, because we didn't have those back in the day. So I actually paid close to $35,000 for restoring the data.
Thankfully, we got back all of it. It was quite priceless. Yeah, it was priceless. It was a huge decision to make, but yeah, moral of the story, backup your data once a quarter, once a month, whatever it means to you.
I mean, it's a very, very cheap investment to make. Or save it on the cloud, and then pay Google later. Yeah, all that. So what is the profundity of the money?
Yeah, you're waiting to ask that. Okay, here we go. Again, the source for this doesn't need to be said anymore. Regular Simplified listeners will know.
And new listeners can very easily guess, actually. This shows a man with a cape wearing stilettos, for some reason, on top of a very, very rocky patch. For one, okay, that might be a woman, I'm not quite sure. But that is definitely not prepping apparel or shoes.
Anyway, and it says, F-E-A-R has two meanings. The first is forget everything and run. Or the second one is face everything and vice. The choice is yours.
Good morning. Absolutely. And this also is watermarked by living the law of attraction. I have no idea what that means.
And the metaphor for this, see, it's almost like a dystopian image where there's a woman with a cape on stilettos during a trek. And I'm not quite sure how she might get up that pile of rubble, which has a lot of high rises and stuff in the background. Law of attraction must be gravity, right? Like, M1 and 2, you are that, you know, inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
In the case, I have a better expansion for F-E-A-R. It is forwarding exceedingly annoying rubbish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the word, right?
So I have this nice story about trekking which I can... So a bunch of my friends, they went to this place called Bali Plus. Okay, Bali Plus is some severely mountaineering level place to go to up there in snow ground. In India?
Yeah, in India. So they had four or five of them. I was going to be part of them for some reason, I couldn't go out a lot of work. And these guys went.
They had a bunch of mountaineers with them. And apparently, these guys were going to exchange their budget. Sounds like a good thing to skim to money on them. So the thing is, the last guy, there's one guy, the other end of the rope is put on the other side of the rock.
And then, you know, you basically walk down and walk across whatever, secure in another way that the rope is tied to your waist. And after everything is done, after all the guys have crossed wherever they're supposed to cross, the last mountaineering, the team guy, the porter, he's supposed to clamber up to the rock, which the rope was tied to, get that rope and come down. So after some time, these people were very supremely confident. They were going all over these edges, precipices around them.
And then, they realized that the last guy, in order to save time and labor, he was removing that rope and holding it. So the last guy is walking, being walked like a poppy. Wow. This is a type of stuff that makes it to tinkle, no?
Let's take a little break before we get into the meat of this episode, which is not banned in UD. Yeah, so we'll be right back. Are you looking for financial products and services that can enhance your personal finance experience? Are you looking for a space to talk about your financial product or service?
And are you looking for a crisp talk show where the conversation is all about money? Well, your search ends here. Hi, my name is Anupag Gupta, and I'm host of the Paisa Paisa Podcast, and I invite you for the conversation about your personal finance on each Monday on the IBM Podcast app, or the website, or on any podcast streaming platforms. See you, folks.
Welcome back to the promised knowledge part of this episode, which is neat. Today, I am going to talk about something very inherent in us. Specifically, I am a simplified host, or the ability, our ability to bullshit on and on for hours and end, under the pretense of, what do we do? Educating people, but actually making no sense, and using it in excuse to slip in the odd, you know what I was going to say.
Jeeves, there are times in life when one wonders, if trousers matter, and Jeeves says, the moment will pass, sir. Oh, fantastic. But no, no, I was actually talking about all humans, actually. And that's DNA.
Ah, good old deoxidabo-nucleic acid, or Danny A, to his friends. So what light do you want to shed on this whiten molecule, Chuck? Increasingly, there is talk about DNA being used as a storage device. So that piqued my interest, as it were.
But before that, let's address the elephant in the room. The person who discovered DNA. I don't like where this is going. His male child seemed to have a pain in the neck.
So the scientist said, what, son? Crick? Terrible, terrible. So terrible.
I know. Sorry. We have to get it out of the way. Anyway, it's important we understand what DNA itself is, before jumping into how we can put all our porn on it.
Marketing majors would be shocked to know that DNA is actually a thing. And it's not like there's something that is part of every band. Like your DNA of Amul, your DNA of Coke. That comes from deep within your marketing DNA.
It's hurting my DNA. Well, this thing actually exists in real life. Yeah. It's made up of hundreds or maybe thousands of slides.
Each slide is made up of bullet points. Two already formatted, over-worded bullet points. As it's not. Each bullet point is made up of words.
Each word is made up of? Alphabets? Usually, yes. But this is a marketing PowerPoint presentation.
So gas. The entire presentation is basically a collection of millions of little pieces of gas. Just like that, the bodies of all living creatures have very basic chemicals called amino acids, which together form proteins, which then, of course, go on to form cells, which then go to form organs, which, when put together, form organisms. And this process is true no matter whether you're a cute kitten or a great white shark or whether you're Elon Musk or, of course, Donald Trump.
Oi, oi, oi. I'm willing to tell you on the fundamental competition of Trump, okay? I have a sneaky suspicion that his molecular code is made out of gold flakes to it rather than proteins. But perhaps that's an explanation.
So what happens is new proteins need to be made all the time in our body. But proteins have to be made in a very specific shape. Otherwise, it goes all wrong and becomes unusable. Much like, just imagine, like, there's a guitar with no place to put strings.
Useless like that. Or Kingfisher Airlines rock document in 2015. Useless like that. It is printed on software and absorbing paper.
Or any copy of the Times of India. In order to ensure that new proteins are made exactly the way that they should be, there are a set of codes. Hundreds of codes for hundreds of proteins. All these codes are written in a book.
It's a very, very difficult to read book called DNA. And it's difficult to read not because it's long, terribly boring, and makes zero practical sense like a lot of other things. Hey, hey, come on. Because it's long and spirally.
So, TLDR, DNA is a massive line of code which holds the key to making proteins. But the DNA itself can't be bothered to move. So it conveniently creates copies of parts of itself and shuttles these off to protein making factories called ribosomes. Here, proteins are made according to the genetic code contained in the RNA.
And in the meantime, people from Lokandwala are like, bro, why so much trouble to get protein? Just go to rock you. So, net-net DNA is a programming language of our body. Which is why I suppose the wrong line of code can lead to some flawed programs like Donald Trump.
The president of the USA cannot be compiled. Programming about now. Thank you for that. I'll see you in the lesson, Chuck.
We should get back to storage now. Remember, it's the last time you heard the word ribosomes. I know. So, DNA can be artificially synthesized in laboratories and can also be read.
This is another new research that has been going on for years, if not decades. Courting some controversy as well, like what is cloning and stuff being involved. But let's not get into that right now. Of course, maybe humans should not be too scared of this either because for years the pop music industry has been using algorithms to pretty much turn off the same song year after year and we don't seem to mind.
I'm assuming you didn't exactly like Shape of You by Ed Sheeran now. You guessed correctly. So, what happened is last year, scientists at the University of Washington successfully stored on and recovered data from artificially synthesized DNA. So, firstly, there's a fact that DNA was made in the lab and then there's a fact that they were able to store data on it and then retrieve data from it.
Now, you might wonder what the big whoop about all this is and whether it's worth making our collective scientific heads over, figuring out if you need to buy your own personal DNA printer. But get this, one cubic millimeter, one millimeter cube can store an exabyte of data. That's 10 raised to 18 bytes. If you can't picture that, that's basically a million TB.
Okay, so let's assume that a single music file is 50 MB if you want to listen to it properly in flack, that is. Of course, if you have not guessed so far, Chuck is a music snob of Simplified. Hey, I mean, it's great for this episode being recorded in high-res audio anyway. So, just assume that a song is 50 MB.
Okay, so that means one TB can hold around 20,971 songs. So, one million TB holds, and I kid you not, 20,971,520,000 songs. And you usually see numbers only like this when the Congress commits a scam. Now, assuming each song is five minutes, that's a lot of minutes, which is basically 199,500 years of music.
Holy shit. Almost 200,000 years of music in one cubic millimeter. Wow, wow, wow. That's basically the point that I was trying to make.
Incredible passion density. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They say that the entire content of the internet, the whole bloody internet, can be stored in an area as large, and I use that term very loosely over here, a sugar cube. So, that's like the pop culture representation of the entire content of the internet equal to one sugar cube.
Yeah, so that's basically the upshot of this. So, how come it's so efficient in storage? This is like, it's not just exponential. This is like a whole new paradigm, right?
So, my first guess is that current storage puts data on zeros and ones, where DNA has four things, right? A, C, G, T. Wait, wait, wait. I remember this stuff.
Adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. There are four components of DNA. We should visit them again in the content section of this. Of course.
Sorry about that. I see the RNA in your brain is working fairly well. So, yes, that is one of the reasons. But there's another reason, actually.
DNA, like Donald Trump, is extremely dense. DNA, unlike Donald Trump, is very compact. So, it's a combination of both sides. This reminds me of, you know, there's controversy about Donald Trump saying mean things about Miss Universe because she bloated up too much.
So, my suggestion at that time, I thought it was very clever, but nobody thought of it, was that he should have, instead of saying all those nasty things, he should have called her Miss Early Universe because she was hot, dense, and rapidly expanding. No! It's like Mike was not a third to that fool. You'd drop it and walk away.
So, where were we? So, DNA is extremely dense and it's very compact. So, it's a combination of both these factors that makes it actually very good storage. Additionally, other storage devices, like Donald Trump, are prone to corruption.
Hard disk drives, unlike Donald Trump, need a constant supply of electricity to keep them running. Hence, the maintenance of which, like Donald Trump, works out super expensive and some would say needlessly so. DNA storage is, like Donald Trump, seemingly resistant to everything. In fact, scientists have found actual natural DNA that, like Donald Trump supporters believes, dates back to prehistoric times.
I like how Donald Trump is acquired to explain everything about DNA storage. So, long story short, there are a lot of advantages of, apart from the fact that a lot of data can be stored in very, very small areas of DNA storage, it's also the fact that it's resistant to almost everything. So, like a CD drive, a CD for instance, a small scratch is rendered useless. A flash drive or a hard disk can fail because of a mechanical error or formatting problem or something at any point of time.
But DNA is, like, resistant to, you know, pretty much all that. And on that note, we are going to take a small break, the duration of which would probably take a 0.01% of a cubic mm of DNA storage. I have a feeling I still have a few years, but okay, we'll be back sooner than that. See you around.
Good morning, evening, afternoon. My podcast is Cyrus Says, where no guest, no topic, and no filter is safe from further brochure. That's me. Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
I'm a little kids. Which happens, you'll never meet. Traffic jams on the streets and people. from all professions.
Every Monday, I go live with the show Ask Me Anything AMA. Before the questions, I don't say better than a Mumbai rich chat writer. I even host a panel of discussion called Cock and Bull where we dive into current affairs and wonder why anyone cares at all. And Friday releases are always surprise episodes for you all.
So tune in to Cyrus Fairs on YouTube and all audio streaming platforms. It feels like everyone's talking about two things right now, pickleball and podcast. So what happens when someone who's lived her whole life on the court decides to bring those two words together? I'm Sanya Mirzam and I'm bringing you a brand new podcast, Serving It Up with Sanya.
I've had some incredible conversations with friends, fellow athletes, artists and entrepreneurs. Each episode starts with a game of pickleball and once the rallies are done, the real talk begins. Serving It Up with Sanya, watch and listen on YouTube and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And welcome back to part three of this podcast and unlike the Godfather and Matrix series, we promise you this part three will be worth your time.
Wow, you're a freak of bashing pop culture today, aren't you? Don't even get me started on Game of Thrones. Anyway, before we start this, it's important for you guys to know the first images that were ever transferred through this medium. It's a historic moment, guys.
You're on the world successfully completing an experiment that could actually change human lives and the world. Reduce storage by thousands of percentage points. Pretty much save all the electricity that's being used to power storage because DNA doesn't need electricity to power it unlike our hard disks and servers. So you want these images to be iconic, right?
The first images that are going to be transmitted, these are going to be the one giant step or good luck Mr. Borski of DNA storage. And it started off well. There were three images.
The first of them was a sitting opera house. Nice choice, nice sunset, nice colorful crowd. And the second pic was a cat with its tongue out. Charming, but perhaps succumbing to their preponderance on the internet.
Perhaps a hat tip to the role played by ancient Egyptians in Saudi Arabia binary device storage technology. Oh my god. And the third picture, I kid you not, they had literally all the options in the world. It's a awesome thing.
They had a millioniae of content, 2000 if you have to say, worth of content that they could put out. Like every single picture ever imaginable. And they go with the monkey smiling. The one of him covering his face.
That's right. That picture was a meta for itself. Imagine, there'll be a museum somewhere in the Mona Lisa, right? Next to it, a Grambles telephone.
Next to it, the first computer to have internet on it. And next to it, a pixelated image of a stupid monkey sheepishly covering his face as if he'd send a proposal So, when can we expect to buy these DNA-based finder, I think? Yeah, I think you just need to don't count on the next big billion sale for that. I must say that the University of Washington experiment, which obviously we talked about, that is writing data on and retrieving data from DNA, that experiment, it wasn't the first time storage and retrieval was done, actually.
Four years ago, scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, successfully did exactly the same thing. And their body of work which they transferred onto a DNA and extracted was 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, 26 second audio clip of the I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King and the well-known paper on the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick themselves and a photograph of the EBI headquarters in the UK. And of course, a file describing the method behind converting the data. So all this, they managed to put onto DNA and extract from DNA.
The difference between the 2013 experiment and the one that they did right now, which is causing waves is, in the 2013 experiment, the entire strand of data would have to be sequenced even if you want a small piece of information. Which is to say that, mention all these things, Shakespeare's sonnet and the speech, etc, etc. Suppose you wanted only the photograph of the headquarters, you would still have to sequence everything else. So you had no choice.
And this is a painfully long process. So it's not like, you know, it takes like a couple of minutes or seconds. It's really, really long time that it takes to sequence everything just to get that one small thing that you want. And that's practical application for us is very difficult, right?
A major factor for us for this technology to be practical is that we select whatever parts we need from what is stored. So this is why the second experiment is as important and path-breaking. So I don't think you're going to be able to see cool pen drives anytime soon. Sorry.
The thing is, you see, it's still supremely expensive. The 2013 experiment cost $12,400 to encode data and $220 for retrieval of data per MB. Damn. That's a total of $12,620 per MB.
If you run that by our earlier music example, the 1mm cube full of high-res flat music would cost $12 billion billion. Or roughly, 164,000 times the GDP of the entire world. But I am a regular customer. Really nice to know.
5% discount. 5% discount. 5% cashback. No, man, DNA app.
How much cashback will you get on this? First MB real free. Someone's been really using... Use a code like FIFRK or something.
Prime truck on DMV. But with ACTG. But see, costs are rapidly shrinking and we should have some sort of consumer product in about 10 years' time. So, some manifestation of this we will see in our lifetime.
And it's good that it's going to come in 10 years' time because scientists estimate that by 2040, here's another whole new problem. We don't have silicon from the planet to power storage devices needed to keep pace with storage demands. Because all of those existing silicon chips will be filled with two drink theater songs or something. It sounds like you will be insisting on listening to all the music in flack.
And that's all that we have for you on this episode of Simplified. I do not like that putting on your face, Chuck. That can mean only one thing. You must be wondering how I know so much about the competence of DNA.
Not really. That's because I had a nose in DNA. Simon and Garfunkel featuring Watson and Crick, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Thanks for ruining that song for me.
Lizards, my friends, on the other hand, have a different competent in their DNA. They have something called Iguanine. Make it stop. Just make it stop.
At least there's probably only one left, I guess. No, no, the fourth competent I couldn't make a joke on it. So let's go to other parts of the cell now. In the good old days, along with protein, women who worked in the fields used to carry food grains and they held them very close to their breasts.
Hence, it was said that protein is made by Rhybosoms. Correct. I think half of my DNA just made a genetic suicide. Anyway, in this form, the woman's mobile phone ran out of power until she realized that her con, dehumidifying machine, could power it.
So you could say that mitocondryer is the powerhouse of the cell. Oh God, I genuinely don't know what to say anymore. Terrible, man. This is a mitocontriate all over, all spontaneously all mitocontriate I'm going to spike and all and destroy each other.
Okay, so that's all I have. Sorry. Very sorry about that, listeners. Apparently, that's the USP of the show now, though.
Yeah, so while we still maintain some sanity, let's sign off. This has been Simplified, your fortnightly dose of wisdom. And if you haven't subscribed to us already, now would be a good time. Get out your phones, download a good podcast app like Pocket Cast, those unlucky enough to still be on Apple devices, you can use that stupid native podcast app, what do you have, and search for Simplified and just subscribe to us.
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Please do come back. We're not all bad. Bye.