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Useless Fact: Each Sperm Carries 37.5 MB of DNA Data

by - source: Tom's Hardware US

Did you know that each sperm carries the equivalent of 37.5 MB of DNA data? Imagine the throughput of hundreds of million sperm!

I stumbled over this vital piece of information when an Austrian Facebook page announced that it would publish its Facebook Page "Unnuetzes Wissen", which translates to "Useless Knowledge" as a printed book and gave a taste of the vital information that can be found on its pages. You could learn, for example, that the 55 percent of DNA of a banana represents human DNA. Or, you will be reminded of the source of the word spam as we use it to describe unsolicited email.

However, its likely more than computer nerd will find it interesting that each sperm carries DNA worth about 37.5 MB of data. It appears that this has been common knowledge in some corners of the web, but it was certainly news to me. Apparently, that number results from the assumption that a human cell can hold 75 MB of genetic information. So, if you complete that thought and assume that an ejaculation event typically holds 200 - 300 million sperm (and yes, we know that there are fabs out there with smaller and bigger production capacities), that would be 7153 TB to 10,729 TB per ejaculation.

Of course, you can find plenty of nerd jokes on the web - the kind of jokes you may want to avoid during a romantic encounter. Do not talk about the bandwidth of your production system (apparently about 1.4 TB/s to 2.2 TB/s if you consider an uptime of five seconds and ignore potential packet loss), severed connections, upload and download speeds, data compression techniques, and do not suggest the usage of a renewable material source for future storage devices.

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SteelCity1981 11/26/2011 10:16 AM
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-20+

There is soo many jokes you can come up with (no pun intended) around this subject alone lol.

mayankleoboy1 11/26/2011 10:17 AM
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-20+

whew!
just shot....er created 1.2TB of data.

alidan 11/26/2011 10:25 AM
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anyone remember the jpeg "my dick has higher bandwith than xxxx" i cant find the jpeg on google, but i have it some where on my hdd, where all the math is calculated, and in school i used that as a base for a tshirt, but that project died due to teacher not having a sense of humor.

amk-aka-Phantom 11/26/2011 10:32 AM
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-20+

Thank you very much for adding a "Useless Fact" prefix to the article name.

tanjo 11/26/2011 10:33 AM
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-8+

You're probably shedding more DNA data through dead skin cells... (considering the time you need to shoot)

jiyung 11/26/2011 10:38 AM
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-17+

Well then I guess I found the solution to the current lack of hard drive in shops.

gmcizzle 11/26/2011 10:42 AM
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-20+

Time for some benchmarks.

de5_roy 11/26/2011 10:53 AM
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-18+

i approve of this article! thumbs up!

DEVILVSANGEL00 11/26/2011 10:57 AM
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-13+

cool useless fact, made me laugh knowin that :)

a_dude 11/26/2011 11:09 AM
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DXRick 11/26/2011 11:27 AM
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One of the few times in a man's life when he can contribute 50% of the data with a woman and actually create something positive.

perfectblue 11/26/2011 11:33 AM
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What a fact! Nice find!

_Pez_ 11/26/2011 11:35 AM
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Cool I am storage Machine ! :D

_Pez_ 11/26/2011 11:37 AM
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-14+

_Pez_ :
Cool I am storage Machine !


hmm I mean, I'm the production facility. rolf..

alyoshka 11/26/2011 11:38 AM
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eddieroolz 11/26/2011 11:38 AM
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Anonymous 11/26/2011 11:54 AM
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2.2 TB/s
wow faster than several hundred ssd in raid
time to invent fiber sperm cable

alidan 11/26/2011 12:11 PM
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deathmage 11/26/2011 12:14 PM
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-11+

Bring a whole new grasp to the term... "That's a load off my mind" when you ejaculation. :P

JOSHSKORN 11/26/2011 12:19 PM
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What are the system requirements to execute this data?

KingArcher 11/26/2011 12:19 PM
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Just Curious: Are the DNA data identical in every carrier? Or are there any differences?

Each egg on the other side, are they identical to each other too?

would like to know this too.

Anonymous 11/26/2011 12:54 PM
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sixdegree 11/26/2011 1:01 PM
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Too bad Durex and Trojan put data cap on that bandwidth.
Time to change to At&T.

Anonymous 11/26/2011 1:25 PM
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So that's what was inside those "gel-packs" in Voyager (from ST: Voyager).

neoverdugo 11/26/2011 1:30 PM
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NuclearShadow 11/26/2011 1:42 PM
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Well then, I guess I am now going to alter what I say when I reach that point and just shout out 10,729 Terabytes. Now if I could just get her to use her other gateways more often...

Anonymous 11/26/2011 2:09 PM
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-9+

Actually, you're out by a factor of 20
- the human genome comprises 2.9 Billion base pairs, where each base-pair is equivalent to 2-bits
- so that's about 725MBytes

Divide by two to give storage capacity of each gamete? Ok, I'll give you that one
- 362MBytes then...

calguyhunk 11/26/2011 2:26 PM
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-18+

So much valuable data wasted everyday across the world! We need better data management :P

lightzy 11/26/2011 2:27 PM
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But can it play crysis?

Anonymous 11/26/2011 2:43 PM
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thanks you for the news, in these days when HDD are so damn costly this news would be pleasure for all.
Wow i got myself a 2TB thanks to sunny leone :P

theuniquegamer 11/26/2011 2:49 PM
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Benchmarks ANYONE!!!!!!
Winner of HIGHEST BANDWIDTH is ????


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