Balancing Act
This month’s Prism illustrates two extremes when it comes to the pace of technology. Charles Choi’s cover story explores stunning advances in using DNA as a tool to store society’s immense and constantly growing volume of data. “DNA can store an extraordinary amount of data–up to one exabyte, or 1 billion gigabytes, per cubic millimeter,” Choi writes. “In theory, just a few kilograms of DNA could store all of humanity’s data.” Interest in the field exploded in 2012 when Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church and his colleagues demonstrated that such a technique could vastly outperform mainstream data storage methods. They translated into DNA a 53,000-word-plus book on synthetic biology that Church had coauthored, as well as 11 images and a JavaScript program. Now the field presents several intriguing engineering challenges. One is reducing the cost of synthesizing DNA. Another is correcting the vulnerability of DNA synthesis techniques to errors. A third is finding a way to retrieve specific files from a collection of records. But researchers are already imagining wild future breakthroughs—like duplicating a brain.
Also in the category of advances—this time on the biomedical front—Jennifer Pocock’s profile of Liangfang Zhang, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of California–San Diego, describes his work on a novel therapeutic technology–a “nanosponge”–to attack toxins.
At the other end of the scale, Tom Grose reports on the slow pace of fixing flaws in voting machines. It took a federal court last summer to force the state of Georgia to scrap machines the judge found to be “antiquated, seriously flawed, and vulnerable to failure, breach, contamination, and attack.” This came more than a decade after Princeton University computer scientists found flaws in the same model of machines Georgia was using. According to the nonprofit Verified Voting Foundation, eight states—home to an estimated 10 percent of registered voters in 2016—will head into the November 2020 presidential election relying fully or partially on direct-recording electronic touch-screen machines that don’t produce auditable paper ballots. Experts fear these machines could be vulnerable to hackers, possibly resulting in widespread election tampering.
Flip this issue over and read Pierre Home-Douglas’s inviting look at the town he came to love as a student and continues to enjoy. It’s Montréal, site of this year’s ASEE Annual Conference and a fête of great food and fascinating history. The back section also provides the highlights of a conference you won’t want to miss.
We hope you enjoy the February Prism. Let us know your reaction.
CORRECTION: Our January feature, “From Hotline to Front Line,” stated incorrectly that Robin Coger, dean of engineering at North Caroline A&T State University, had been an associate dean. Coger also wishes to correct the impression left by the article that she had not benefited from mentoring in the past.
Mark Matthews
m.matthews@asee.org