looks like the swiss like me right says the 15 nations of the 50 story. and 50 very personal tips on berlin's very best. good now. covering with g.w. . you're tuned to tomorrow today coming up for. ancient database newly discovered is d.n.a. the data storage solution of the future. we visit a crime scene what can the tiniest traces of d.n.a. tell investigators. and it's not all in our genes exercise makes cells grow. and. data data and

more data it used to be kept on magnetic tape and floppy disks today the world produces more than 30 zettabytes of digital information per year that's 30 trillion gigabytes and that number is rising each year how come we store it on c.d.'s hard drives and flash drives have expected lifespans of around 30 years. but there's a special medium that could do the trick one that has proved itself over billions of years d.n.a. . life or tyler d.n.a. has 2 advantages for us to get the data in d.n.a. is extremely durable under the right conditions that can last around a 1000 years and the 2nd d.n.a. is very compact you can store vast amounts of data in a tiny space by. robert gross is a chemistry professor at e.t.h. there rick you know versity. together with a team of researchers he's developed

a way of storing digital files like m p 3 s. all to official genetic material. a d.n.a. molecule consists of 4 nuclear bases abbreviated a c. and g. the computer signs a binary code of zeros and ones to each face. the d.n.a. synthesizer creates a strand of artificial d.n.a. that the digital file is stored on and the command to be read. the person is still very complex and expensive i see companies like microsoft have been investing in d.n.a. storage and further recent. them as you can volunteer data storage is getting better every year computers are getting faster but the physical properties that our computers currently work with can't keep valving forever at some point will reach

a limit it's just a matter of physics so the industry is looking beyond the principles of physics and into things like biology and chemistry and what principles that are out there that could be used to store data and when you think about it d.n.a. is the answer. dauphine. d.n.a. is especially interesting as a long term storage solution. because humans will always be interested in analyzing their own genetic material the devices that read d.n.a. a very unlikely to become obsolete. d.n.a. can also last a very long time under the right conditions samples of ancient fossils are mammoths frozen in permafrost have shown that the molecules can stay intact for thousands of years. the problem is the d.n.a. only remains stable if the bone samples have been perfectly preserved. even in the

laboratory a d.n.a. molecule to case after just a few months there is in the mirror the solution we have is a kind of artificial fossil basically trying to create the equivalent of a bone. a bone is a piece of calcium phosphate with d.n.a. inside it what we're working on is a small glass beads with strands of d.n.a. inside and seen in australia and you parked in. the d.n.a. should last up to a 1000 years preserved in glass beads a so small they can only be seen under an electron microscope. each beat contains about 10 killer bytes of data about 2 pages of a book with the seriousness of trying almost since the truth of what you can see in this image is about 20 or 30 pages of a book of the beauty but remember these particles are at 200000 times magnification human if they really are incredibly small. so if you have 20 or 30 pages here and

we zoom out a bit then you have a whole book on the screen. and a bit further out now you have the whole floor of the library. spoken sort of people have taken to not let you go even further out you have billions of these tiny boots so you have a whole library on something the size of a speck of dust from the americans would take in a park. right now they can only store a few 100 megabytes and that's why so a lot more development is needed before we have a whole library stored in d.n.a. . we have the perfect storage device in our body nearly every cell has the blueprint of life in its nucleus quote up in the form of chromosomes. d.n.a.

. it stores characteristics like gender poor i and hair color and everywhere we go we leave traces of it behind at a crime scene it's like a calling card left by the perpetrator. blood. sperm. saliva the sources detectives often look for to provide d.n.a. samples. but a crime scene can provide valuable traces of d.n.a. on practically any object. nowadays touching something. just once can leave enough genetic material for investigators to analyze. at the institute of parenthetic medicine and the swiss city of burn around 4 and 5 of the analyses that geneticist sylvia but securities out in her lab involves samples left by casual contact so-called touch d.n.a. that a contact. with touch d.n.a.

you can get a range of results from a good profile to an unusable one but we've reached the point where we can create a genetic profile from just 10 to 20 cells. since the early days in the development of d.n.a. profiling 35 years ago the amounts of genetic material needed to get a result have fallen steadily. every cell nucleus in the body contains a person's entire genome packed into 23 pairs of chromosomes. half of your d.n.a. comes from your mother and the other half is from your father forensic investigators compare stretches of d.n.a. that can vary widely from individual to individual segments that don't encode for genes the trick is to 1st make millions of copies of the d.n.a. under examination that's what enables can even tiny traces of d.n.a. to be analyzed. at a crime scene there may be thousands of touch d.n.a.

samples. like on the wine glass in this scene. the bottle has been touched by several people. and the knife may have been used by a friend of the victim. separating all those strains is a lot of work for so dio but her analyses using modern methods often produce inconclusive d.n.a. profiles to illustrate these 2 peaks are typical of a clear fingerprint from a blood sample but an average touch d.n.a. sample looks quite different with many smaller peaks that indicate it contains d.n.a. from several people that often makes the result unusable makes a thing they're all mangled you often wish for a clearer picture. sometimes you see d.n.a.

and the profile from a person who has nothing to do with the crime. that. such false d.n.a. positives have confused the number of cases like this one the same d.n.a. was identified at 35 separate crime scenes it appeared that one woman had been committing crimes for 15 years burglary theft even murder investigators searched for her fever actually but a few months later they had to admit the notorious phantom was just that. the criminal mastermind didn't exist the d.n.a. was that of a worker and a medical equipment company whose job it was to package cotton swabs for crime scene. that contamination lead officials astray for 15 years with us looking at the of course we try to avoid contamination. but that's very difficult due to the high sensitivity of the tests so we're all

registered in the database to about. d.n.a. profiling can now even predict physical traits that result from specific genes including characteristics like hair or eye color sylvia looks has decided to try the new analysis method she's eager to see what it can deliver. to geneticists profile turkoman d.n.a. and that of 2 coworkers. according to the analysis test subjects number one has blond hair with a probability of 54 percent. and brown eyes likelihood 70 percent. number 2 is blonde with only a 68 percent probability. and an 89 percent chance of being blue-eyed well that's right at least. sylvia says blond hair as predicted and her blue eyes with high probability. the geneticist says the test

works most reliably for people with complection that are either very fair or very dark. i think high color can be a clue with the past in hospital with dark eyes i see had color a bit more critically how can be done right and it can turn gray it changes over the course of a lifetime exactly how is the subject of research at the moment there are studies going on looking at a number of characteristics including for skin color of the hat properties like curly or straight to the heart block. and in the coming years traces of d.n.a. at crime scenes are likely to provide more information even predicting the shape of a suspects face some researchers think a complete identikit damage could be on the cards. i color is just the beginning.

did you learn that the ability to roll your tongue is hereditary it's a popular belief that although there may be a genetic component you can learn to roll your tongue. but i am hair color are genetically determined. on facebook we asked what you've inherited from your parents. elvira writes that she inherited her curls and the characteristic color of her skin. pedro says that he has eyebrows and a mole from his father and his right eye comes from his mother with a slightly drooping eyelids. marionette inherited flat feet shortsightedness and clear skin from her parents. and luis mentions green eyes and yellow teeth which he calls dog teeth blond hair and caucasian skin thanks to all of you for writing in.

before we're born it's pretty clear what we're going to look like. but over the course of evolution our genes have adapted to the environment. one study says that our nose shape has adapted to the climate with warm humid areas leading to wider nostrils and a cold climate to more narrow ones but are we as good as it gets. there are plenty of features that don't make us look so good. no human beings some of us think we're great the pinnacle of evolution. really. we might have high performance brains for instance but they're also extremely dependent on oxygen a construction flaw that can quickly become. fatal. our

evolution through the eon says the left our eyes with a blind spot and they see the world upside down our brains have to invert the image to compensate. and our jaws shrunk so starkly over time they've become too small for all of our teeth fortunately we have braces to correct that and line them all up again. our windpipes branching straight off from the esophagus leaving us in constant danger of choking on our food. and that was just the head and neck and by no means the entire story. on the other hand life is only as diverse and varied as it is precisely because of developmental flaws. because every time an organism reproduces something can go wrong and over the course of evolution that's led to a string of new life forms with new characteristics and abilities.

eventual e we humans emerged with all our inadequacies. like our backs we inherited our backbones from fish 500000000 years ago they needed something to attach their muscle tissues to the birth of the spine. in the weightlessness of the primordial oceans brilliant innovation but far too weak for life on dry land. yet another flaw that was never ironed out. throughout the ages we've been passing this flaw along with myriads of others from generation to generation. and even though reproduction is very much hit and miss.

the main reason for that is our upright stance 1st evolved about 3 and a half 1000000 years ago for that our pelvises had to shrink to avoid walking along and to have us walk tall instead. no doubt it looks better. than that. but for reproduction it's a real problem because the human pelvis and birth canal are now so narrow childbirth is a painful procedure. and our children arrive only partly developed small and helpless. a large part of their brains development can only take place after birth in engineering terms the human model can only be labelled a complete failure. but evolution doesn't

care about perfection rather it's all about change and diversity and that's why it's natural for us all to be flawed something that also makes each one of us unique. our d.n.a. provides the maybe not entirely perfect blueprint each of our parents gave us half of their genes but that doesn't mean d.n.a. has to dictate our lives. the influence of the environment on animals and humans is the subject of intense research and many studies show that physical activity has a huge influence on our bodies development at any age. this elderly mouse is showing just how closely movement and balance are related it runs

up to 10 kilometers a day. but this mouse of the same age has never been allowed on a treadmill. comparing the sedentary mouse with that sporty colleague tells a lot about the effects of movement on balance. and it's likely that humans respond in a similar way. was the music. the mice are exercising without specifically addressing co-ordination or balance it's purely and during this training we really didn't expect it to have such a powerful effect a fake that i'm likely to have all. the researchers at the center for molecular life sciences at the university of basel in switzerland were very impressed by the speed the old mouse it had only started training on the treadmill 6 weeks before the balance tests before that it had been a sedentary as its body what happened in that period the initial clue came from

a look at neurons in the spinal cords of mice that exercised in ones that didn't as well as young mice. christopher hunch in steam found that the exercise caused rapid regeneration of nerve and muscle cells. the muscles are controlled by motor neurons their colored purple here. they're connected to the stimulant new iran seen here in green their nerve cells in the brain and inner ear that are linked to balance. was made stokes 8 on the left here you can see the image of a young mouse here is the motor neuron and as you can see it has a lot of contact points with the wrist to their neurons. in the meat in the middle we have the image of an elderly mouse that hadn't been exercising and i think it's pretty obvious that there are far fewer green spots there and on the right we have the image of an elderly mouse that's done exercise there are many more green points

in evidence here so the older mouse that exercise looks like the young mouse you know you. kind sheen says that the changes are down to exercise even in old age. levels what we're demonstrating and there are studies on humans as well is that exercise helps even if you don't start till you're older anything is better than doing nothing and it's never too late to get. another lab at the university of basel mice are running around to their heart's content and their muscular activity has this down the affects as well they develop new cells in the brain that may not be a new discovery but now the researchers have shown. these additional nerve cells improve the precision of that memory capability that.

the ability to remember requires highly flexible cells that can quickly store precise information in the brain things like. where did that with that key again. what was it i wanted to buy. where they parked my car. use officious beggars team tested the still active cells from the brain of a sporty mouse. these were cells that had only just been formed. these young cells that have just developed more easily excited all that neighboring older cells. and they also established fresh connections with other cells faster than the older ones did active newly formed cells perfect for crystal clear memory and experiment with these objects was used to show if mice that had been exercising really did have better memories than their peers bischof bagger confronted an

active mouse and a more sedentary mouse with 2 identical objects mice like new things and investigate them by sniffing. a day later he replaced one object with something similar. only the 5th mouse recognized it is new and sniffed it more intensely. the mouse that had not exercised couldn't tell the difference between the 2 objects only once bishop beggar had replaced the white pyramid with a black one did the unsporting now see the object of something new and begin to investigate it. so it seems that active mice have a more precise memory thanks to the new brain cells form to exercise. but there is a catch when it's and a new can if the cells on tuesday they die off again within a matter of weeks. so it will take both physical and mental exercise to keep mice

and people on their toes. if out. red white flag on it. now it's your part of the show if you have a science question just ask send it to us as a video text or voice mail if we answer it on the show you'll get a little surprise so just ask you this time we have a cosmic question sent in by a viewer in ghana. how fast is the universe expanding. in 1929 the american astronomer edwin hubble made a groundbreaking discovery. he could found early observations that the light from distant galaxies is more redshifted light from closer ones. that means that distant objects are moving away from us faster than the closer ones. this led hubble to

conclude that the universe is expanding. it all started around 14000000000 years ago with a big bang and ever since the universe has been growing all of its mass with all of its gravitational pull couldn't overpower the force of the expansion of the galaxies that formed continue to grow further and further apart like the raisins in a rising. the rate of expansion is known as the hubble constant it's such a key concept in cosmology we want to know it as precisely as possible the european space agency's planck satellite measured radiation from the early universe and determined that for every megaparsecs or 3300000 light years further away a galaxy is it's receding 6070 kilometers per 2nd faster but more recently the

hubble space telescope examined nearby galaxies and came up with a higher expansion rate of 74 kilometers per 2nd per megawatt hasek based. scrapin see still needs to be explained. many physicists believe but these glimpses into the cosmos show that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing. some us astrophysicists have simulated what would happen if the expansion were to keep accelerating. in this scenario known as the big rip the entire fabric of space time would be torn apart galaxies stars planets even atoms the universe as we know it would cease to exist. fioretti that is fortunately this scenario is very improbable. so keep those questions coming here's how to get in touch on our website twitter or

facebook. that's all for now next time we get into micro plastics they're everywhere and they're said to be very harmful is that true what are the effects of micro plastics find out next week until then take care and see you soon.

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