Scientists inscribe entire Bible onto pinhead

And you thought that fellow who managed to fit your entire name -- middle initial included -- onto a grain of rice was hot stuff. Apparently, a team of nanotechnology experts at the Technion institute in Haifa were able to etch some 300,000 words (Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible) onto a minuscule silicon surface "less than half the size of a grain of sugar." The feat was accomplished by "blasting tiny particles called gallium ions at an object that then rebounded, causing an etching affect," and was reportedly done in order to show that copious quantities of data could eventually be stored on bio-molecules and DNA. Oh, and it only took about sixty minutes to finish the job.

[Image courtesy of ChicagoSpots]

[CarpeD1em500 @ Dec 24th 2007 12:33AM]

Anyone know what 300k words in a plane .txt document equates to in terms of file size? I'm way too lazy to type out "hello" 300k times, (or even copy + paste it).

Either way, nice proof of concept...

[Derek Bradley @ Dec 24th 2007 12:35AM]

i have a .txt bible, its 4.36 mb

[Khris @ Dec 24th 2007 12:38AM]

No idea how big it would be, but 300k words written that fast on something that small seems impossible...

[Perry Barnoy @ Dec 24th 2007 12:40AM]

So... about 5 mb in 60 minutes...

Well, at least it's a good first step. Who knows, in the near future our drives might be just a few cubic millimeters large.

[Chuckles McGee @ Dec 24th 2007 12:43AM]

@Khris

Yeah, I bet sending billions of bits of data per second through a tiny cable with beams of light sounds impossible too- doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

[CarpeD1em500 @ Dec 24th 2007 12:52AM]

Ahh thanks for the clarification. Interesting, very interesting.

[yoshi @ Dec 24th 2007 1:06AM]

Well, um...err....

You don't really have to type "hello" 300k times, do you? You know how many bytes "hello" takes - 5. So, assuming the average word size was 5 characters, maybe 6 with spaces, that's some 6 x 300k, give or take....

[Joe @ Dec 24th 2007 1:41AM]

4.36mb is probably way too high... I'm betting you have the old+new testament on there. So half that would be a better estimate but biblical Hebrew uses less words English to serve the same purpose, so I'd guess around 2 - 2.2mb is a more accurate estimate of what's actually on the pin. Still impressive.

[KC @ Dec 24th 2007 2:04AM]

The whole problem is that the original article did not state how the bible was written on the pinhead, that is, in binary, and compressed or what? If it was actually written as text, then what was the actual font size used, etc.

[ace_spades @ Dec 24th 2007 2:05AM]

its just the old testament/5 books of Moses

[Will H. @ Dec 24th 2007 12:39AM]

It sounds just like a really, really small dot matrix printer. cool.

[Yevon @ Dec 24th 2007 12:49AM]

NanoBible (TM) coming to a bookstore near you.

[robert @ Dec 25th 2007 3:55PM]

No way, it'll be called the iBle.

[ipodrulz @ Dec 24th 2007 12:57AM]

Wait.. the bible has 300,000 words?

[Paul @ Dec 24th 2007 1:32AM]

They clarify in the post that it is the Hebrew version of the Jewish Bible.

[ipodrulz @ Dec 24th 2007 1:37AM]

Ahh.. understood.. thanks.. thought someone added a couple thousand pages to my bible.

[PJK @ Dec 24th 2007 5:00AM]

No someone took away a couple thousand pages from your bible. The text was what's known to Christians as the old testament. The King James bible, which most people are familiar with, is significantly longer.

[cherie22984 @ Dec 24th 2007 12:59AM]

Now I feel like reading the Bible, wonder how long it would take me to
read this.

[Josh @ Dec 24th 2007 1:15AM]

world's smallest joke

[Mike @ Dec 24th 2007 1:28AM]

I'm going to go run in traffic now - because I don't believe in cars.

[Andrew @ Dec 24th 2007 1:36AM]

Yeah Mike, because THAT syllogism makes sense.

[ssuk @ Dec 24th 2007 7:53AM]

Religious discussion is the worst thing to happen to the internet...

[Brent @ Dec 24th 2007 1:20AM]

It's a Christmas miracle!

[Andrew @ Dec 24th 2007 1:38AM]

That made me laugh out loud. Thanks.

[Joe @ Dec 24th 2007 1:44AM]

Unfortunately, this version of the bible has nothing to do with Jesus :(

[murray @ Dec 24th 2007 2:02AM]

Neither does reality.

[Ramifications @ Dec 24th 2007 2:06AM]

@Joe

Actually, the Old Testament (Jewish Bible) has a lot to do with Jesus. Many prophecies about Jesus were in the Old Testament written approximately 700 years before Christ, which pointed to Jesus coming to Earth. Just a few examples,

Isaiah 9:6-7 (NIV) "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7 Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever".

Isaiah 7:14 (NIV) "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel".

Isaiah 53:3 (NIV) "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not".

Isaiah 53:5-7 (NIV) "But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. 6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth".

[Brent @ Dec 24th 2007 2:33AM]

I negatived all of you except Andrew, I wish I could have plussed him twice. How you gonna turn a simple smile on Christmas Eve into a religious debate?

[Joseph @ Dec 24th 2007 2:53AM]

Depends what jewish bible. Some only accept the first 5 books, or the Pentateuch. Of course, there are messianic prophecies in there, as well as hebrew conjugation that eludes to multiple persons in the godhead.

--not debating, but clarifying and earlier statement.

[Boaz @ Dec 24th 2007 12:20PM]

To Ramifications:
Although I can refute every one of your quotes, I'll refer to the one that most "strongly" proves the existence of Jesus in Isaiah:
"Isaiah 7:14 (NIV) "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel".
This is mistranslated, which is what any bible scholar, or anyone who knows a damn about Hebrew will tell you. The word 'alma', which is translated by KJV to "virgin", means nothing of the sort. 'Alma' = young woman. Likewise, the word 'naar' means young male, not child. So the correct translation would be:
"Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The young woman will be with the young male and then give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel". This, of course, has nothing to do with Jesus. Nice try, though.

[Moorio @ Dec 24th 2007 1:26AM]

Wow! Thanks scientists! I was afraid I wouldn't be able to read my bible on a pinhead.

[Adam @ Dec 24th 2007 1:27AM]

Who's the pinhead?

(Bush and his bible thumpers comes to mind).

[Lee Richards @ Dec 24th 2007 2:54AM]

haha, you beat me to it....

[Andrew @ Dec 24th 2007 1:37AM]

Hey, someone cut me a line. *snnnniiffffff* Yeah, that's some good bible.

[Joe @ Dec 24th 2007 1:47AM]

Israeli ingenuity ftw!

[Mike @ Dec 24th 2007 1:49AM]

I assume they had something that could read the data back and make sure it was really 100% there?!?

It sounds like this means we're another step closer to making our current mechanical hard drives extinct and move on to a flash-style drive that's much faster and can hold more data. I like the idea of being able to carry around my entire drive on something only a couple of inches in size - that I can simply plugin to any system and boot up.

[bondsbw @ Dec 24th 2007 2:23AM]

I doubt this is read/write technology. Even if it were, I'd guess that the capacity is smaller than some of the current flash technology in bytes per square millimeter (inferring from the article, the capacity is around 2 MB per 0.01 sq inch, or 200 MB per sq. inch).

Of course, this is probably readable with a microscope... not ones and zeros. If they wanted to encode digital information, they could probably get an easy 8 to 1 ratio of digital information to analog characters... that would increase capacity to 1.6 GB per square inch, which isn't too shabby (but still less than a Blu-ray or HD-DVD, and far less than modern hard drives and holographic drives).

[bondsbw @ Dec 24th 2007 2:30AM]

Actually... I take that back. The article says 0.01 sq. inches, but it also says 0.5 sq. millimeters, which is actually 0.0008 sq. inches. So that's more like 2.5 billion characters per square inch, or close to 10 GB per square inch.

Better... but still no read/write.

[Mike @ Dec 24th 2007 1:57AM]

I'm not going to look up "syllogism" - because I don't believe in dictionaries.

[Andy @ Dec 24th 2007 2:17AM]

A syllogism is a logical construct.

p->q (if p then q)
q->r (if q then r)
r->s (if r then s)
----
p->s must be true

[Andrew @ Dec 24th 2007 2:37AM]

Basically you're an idiot.

[Andrew @ Dec 24th 2007 2:43AM]

Not you Andy. Nice name, and nice work.

[Constable Odo @ Dec 24th 2007 2:07AM]

Big deal. At least 500,000 angels can sit on a head of a pin. I can tell you for a fact it was mighty crowded. Heck of a lot of groping going on, too.

[roflercopterer @ Dec 24th 2007 2:10AM]

Call me when they put a camel through the eye of a needle.

[roflercopterer @ Dec 24th 2007 2:16AM]

I should have gone with "Man that must be one big-ass tattoo"

[Hung @ Dec 24th 2007 11:50AM]

It's falsely translated as "camel," the animal. Really, it's "camel," the the rope (pronounced kha-mell). Doesn't it make more sense for it to be a thick, robust rope than a camel?

[deathwombat @ Dec 24th 2007 2:30AM]

that must have been hard, like trying to find a bible in a haystack...

[ryan @ Dec 24th 2007 2:31AM]

they could always be pulling a fast one on everyone by writing "entire bible" on a pinhead

[Yevon @ Dec 24th 2007 10:23AM]

Funniest comment ever. Thank you.

[euclid @ Dec 24th 2007 2:47AM]

this would have impressed me a decade ago.