The internet preserves unimaginable amounts of data, including huge amounts of minutiae describing people's everyday lives. So here's the question: is this information worth saving for future generations to study, or is this the sort of data that's best forgotten?
The Living Earth Simulator is quite possibly the most ambitious computer project ever undertaken. This all-encompassing simulation will collect all the data in the entire world, to predict everything from the next major disease outbreak to the next financial crisis.
Fundamental to computer science is transmitting information using electromagnetic communication - the 0s and 1s of binary code. But nature's tiniest lifeforms have used a very different method for eons, and figuring out how they do it could revolutionize computers.
