Government intelligence agencies have a plan to build computers that store information inside DNA and other organic molecules（分子）.

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity（IARPA）announced plans to develop tabletop-sized machines that can store and retrieve（取回）data from large batches of polymers — a term that refers to a wide variety of long，string-like molecules. Polymers can store data in individual atoms or groups of atoms.

The project is an attempt to solve a basic problem of the modern era:the vast and growing costs of data storage. Datacenters around the world sucked up 416. 2 terawatt hours of electricity in 2016. That's about 3 percent of the global supply，and it accounts for 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

A 2016 paper found that DNA，in particular，could store computer information more densely，require less energy，and survive higher and lower temperatures than conventional hard drives. The authors of that paper reported on the successes of prototype（雏形）DNA computers that used the genetic molecules for both long-term storage and random access memory（RAM）.

But no one has yet figured out how to handle DNA data storage on large scales.

IARPA officials said the new effort, called Molecular Information Storage, will be broken up into three periods:a two-year program to figure out how to store data in DNA or other molecules at high speed,a two-year program to figure out how to retrieve that data at high speed, and a two-year effort to develop an operating system that can run on that DNA.

Many of the technologies IARPA wants to develop are untested at these scales, so it's unclear how far away that proposed tabletop device really is.

Bad Things About Cell Phones in School

Giving your schoolchild a cell phone has a very positive effect. 【小题1】 However, at school especially in the classroom, cell phones cause a lot of problems.

The Internet capabilities (联网功能) of phones will make students absent from their tasks. 【小题2】 In addition to sending text messages, smartphones have email and Internet capabilities. All of these features will distract (使分心) children from their tasks at hand.

【小题3】 The most common means by which the whole class distraction happens is when a cell phone rings during the middle of a class, attracting students’ attention towards the noise. A student with a cell phone may also encourage others to play the game on his cell phone or share information that comes up on the Internet.

The use of phones may contribute to the students’cheating in the exams. Students can take advantage of cell phones’ Internet capabilities to look for answers to questions for tests for which they haven’t studied. Having a palm-sized computer may give students the chance to cheat in exams. 【小题4】

Using a phone may reduce children’s social behavior. If a student has a cell phone, particularly one with an Internet connection, it must reduce his necessity to socially communicate with others. 【小题5】

   As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, are people remember less? If you know your computer will save information, why store it in your own personal memory, your brain? Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.

In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow conducted some experiments. She and her research team wanted to know the Internet is changing memory. In the first experiment, they gave people 40 unimportant facts to type into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would save the information. The second group understood that the computer would not save it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.

In another experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information an the Internet. The information was in a specific computer folder (文件夹). Surprisingly, people later remember the folder location (位置) better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. Rather, they remember how to find it. This is called “transactive memory (交互记忆)”

According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize huge quantities of information so that they are able to access it at a later date. This doesn’t mean we are becoming either more or less intelligent, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.