NEWS OF THE WEIRD
Can’t Possibly Be True
Scientists at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center announced that they have digitally stored (and retrieved) a movie, an entire computer operating system and a $50 gift card on a single drop of DNA.
In theory, wrote the researchers in the journal Science, they might store, on one gram of DNA, 215 “petabytes” (i.e., 215 million gigabytes – enough to run, say, 10 million HD movies) and could reduce all the data housed in the Library of Congress to a small cube of crystals.
‘Special’ prosecutor
An office in the New York City government, suspicious of a $5,000 payment to two men in the 2008 City Council election of Staten Island’s Debi Rose, opened an investigation, which at $300 an hour for the “special prosecutor,” has now cost the city $520,000, with his final bill still to come.
Despite scant “evidence” and multiple opportunities to back off, the prosecutor relentlessly conducted months-long grand jury proceedings, fought several court appeals, had one 23-count indictment almost immediately crushed by judges, and enticed state and federal investigators to (fruitlessly) take on the Staten Island case. In March, the city’s Office of Court Administration finally shrugged and closed the case.
Ironies
A chain reaction of fireworks in Tultepec, Mexico had made the San Pablito pyro marketplace a scorched ruin, with more than three dozen dead and scores injured, leaving the town to grieve and to solemnly honor the victims – with even more fireworks.
Tultepec is the center of Mexico’s fireworks industry, with 30,000 people dependent on explosives for a living. Wrote The Guardian, “Gunpowder” is in “their blood.”