Useless Fact: Each Sperm Carries 37.5 MB of DNA Data

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.