Saturday, March 26, 2016

Factoid of the day

WHERE IS SHAKESPEARE?

Radar scan of his grave says there is no skull inside.

An old rumor says someone stole it over a bet, and it ended up in another church LINK

According to local folklore, the skull, in a vault beneath Sheldon chapel at St Leonard's Church in Beoley, Redditch, was stolen from the playwright’s tomb in Stratford as part of a wager set by the art historian Horace Walpolein the 1700s.
But the local church authorities there refuse to disturb the grave for DNA testing based on a vague rumor.

and while checking the story, I learned that Shakespeare's sonnets have been encoded in DNA:  from Nature...


The project, led by Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, UK, marks another step towards using nucleic acids as a practical way of storing information — one that is more compact and durable than current media such as hard disks or magnetic tape...
 DNA packs information into much less space than other media. For example, CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva, currently stores around 90 petabytes of data on some 100 tape drives. 

huh? They still use tape drives?


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