Scientists have developed the world’s first living, breathing supercomputer

Conventional supercomputers can perform amazing, almost unimaginably complex calculations – but they’re expensive, a huge power drain, they run incredibly hot, and tend to be about as big as your house (sometimes even bigger).

But what if there were a radically different approach to computing that didn’t rely on the technology of today’s digital circuits? That’s the thinking behind an amazing new biological supercomputer model developed by an international team of researchers, which uses proteins in place of electrons to relay information around a living microchip.

The chip they’ve created is tiny – measuring about 1.5 cm squared – but if you were to zoom in on it you’d find it to be a teeming, city-style grid. Protein strings travel along the streets of this minute metropolis, which are in fact extremely slight channels etched into the circuit.

"We’ve managed to create a very complex network in a very small area," said bioengineer Dan Nicolau Sr. from McGill University in Canada, who has collaborated on the biocomputer concept with researchers from Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands for the better part of a decade. "This started as a back of an envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes."

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-developed-the-world-s-first-living-breathing-supercomputer