AMERICAN BOFFINS DEVELOP A CHEMICAL COMPUTER.

DNA strands contain information but can also process information.: American scientists have used DNA strands as a chemical computer and have shown that they could solve computation problems too complex for conventional computers, according to an article in the January 12 issue of the British journal Nature. The more complex computation problems are those where the number of possible responses -- and therefore the computation time -- increases with the number of variables: each possible solution must therefore be the subject of new computations to verify a series of criteria.The team led by Lloyd Smith of the University of Wisconsin, transposed the problem into the form of genetic sequences and utilized the chemical characteristics of the DNA strands to quickly eliminate the...