Transcriber: mariana vergnano Reviewer: Jin GE
I'd like to tell you about a unique creature and how it can be used
in a surprising way.
Magnetic bacteria are tiny organisms that have nothing to do with humans,
health and disease, unlike the common conception of bacteria.
They live in many different aquatic habitats around the globe.
They come in lots of different shapes and sizes.
From peanut-shapes ones to jellyfish lookalikes.
But they all share one special property:
each of them has one or more chains of tiny magnetic crystals
called magnetisms.
These magnetism chains actually rotate the bacteria
making them like miniature compasses.
And living bacteria also swim according to this orientation.
For me, it all started a year and a half ago
when my mentor, Doctor Rotem Sorek,
a principal investigator at the Weizmann Institute,
told me about the magnetic bacteria
and showed me photos he'd found online of them.
Like Rotem, I found it fascinating,
and spent the next few weeks digging up information on magnetic bacteria
and reading scientific papers about them.
One night, I was lying in bed, [unable] to fall asleep,
wondering about the magnetic bacteria,
when suddenly an idea struck me.
I remembered I'd heard of the concept of magnetic storage
and wondered: "Magnetic bacteria, magnetic storage...
Maybe we could combine the two.
I went to the computer and emailed Rotten.
Surprisingly,even though he was abroad
and it was the middle of the night during a holiday,
a moment later I got a reply.
"I'm interested to hear more.
This holds a good potential for really cool science."
With a such an awesome reply,
of course I started thinking of possible methods
for bacteria-based storage.
With Rotten, I changed, improved and refined it
until we got to a concept.
And this is how it works.
As you may know, digital data is represented by bits
which are designated as zeros and ones.
Every piece of digital data, from documents to movies and songs,
boils down to zeros and ones when it's stored.
Nowadays, these are represented by magnetization,
making dents and various other ways.
Why not represent them by storing bacteria?
Unlike metal and plastic,
bacteria are living creatures and thus duplicate.
And this allows us the fantastic ability of having our data duplicate itself.
How?
Let's represent our data in rooms.
When we want to represent a chamber that represents one,
we'll put one or more bacteria in it.
When we want to represent a zero, we will leave the chamber empty.
Now, imagine we take a row of these chambers
and designate the data in it by placing bacteria.
Now, here is where the magic begins.
If we don't have this as a one-story building,
but rather as a skyscraper
where the bacteria can go from one room to the ones above it,
and then we give them a little nutrients and time,
they'll multiply according to their allocations.
And if we divide it into floors,
you can notice that the bacteria actually duplicated the data for us
and we get lots of copies of the same thing.
Now, this can be done with pretty much any old bacteria.
Why specifically magnetic bacteria?
Well, they help us both with reading and writing the data.
If you would use another type of bacteria,
for reading it, you'd need to employ very complex mechanisms
to detect where you have bacteria.
Meanwhile, these magnetic bacteria
generate tiny magnetic fields around them,
so you can easily sense where they are.
And even dead bacteria are fine,
because they already synthesized magnets for you.
And you can easily write the data
because you can lure the bacteria into where you want them, magnetically.
Now, what advantages does this hold over today's commonplace storage methods?
First of all, the bacteria do the work for you.
You don't need machines churning away hours upon end
with people doing shifts beside them.
You just write the data once,
put generic containers for the bacteria to duplicate into,
and let the bacteria do what they do best.
It's almost "set it and forget it."
But, not only do the bacteria do the work for you,
they can also do it much faster for mass amounts of copies.
Nowadays, however you duplicate data,
you pretty much can't get away from a linear rate.
Our machine can make a certain amount of copies a day,
never mind how many copies it's already made.
Meanwhile, bacteria duplicate exponentially.
To demonstrate, let's imagine your company.
And you want to make a million copies of your DVD.
Say, Disney distributing The Lion King
Nowadays, if you had employed a professional machine,
a single machine for that,
it would take more than three months.
Meanwhile, if you use magnetic bacteria that multiply once every six hours,
it would take no more than ten days.
And there is also an artistic aspect to all of this.
Here, you can see a piece of artwork made by Joseph Minek,
a photographer from Cleveland, Ohio,
to represent the concept of magnetic bacteria storage.
It's part of the SciArt Series,
a series of pieces of art
inspired by projects at the international Intel-ISEF Competition
in which I participated
after I competed at the science competition here,
at the Science Museum in Jerusalem.
I think magnetic bacteria are fascinating creatures
and they can be used in exciting ways.
And maybe, one day, when you buy a computer,
it'll have a magnetic bacteria reading drive in it.
Thank you.
(Applause)