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On-line archives are just blossoming and increasing in number. Since the Internet became the number one source of information on the planet, new web sites telling us fascinating stories are continuously flourishing.

The latest on-line historic archive was made in the UK and features the names of over 100,000 British prisoners of war during WWII.

The details of the Brits captured by the Nazis where until now held at the National Archives in London, after being compiled by the Germans under the 1929 Geneva Convention.

The name of the web site, specialized in family trees, genealogy and census records, is Ancestry.co.uk.

Daniel Jones from Ancestry.co.uk comments: “The unwavering spirit of British Prisoners of War was astounding, with many trying to escape their captors at every opportunity in order to rejoin the war effort. This collection of records will be a way for people to find out more about the heroes in their family.”

The list includes some well-known names, such as Welsh actor Lieutenant Desmond Llewelyn, better known for playing Q in the James Bond movies. He was imprisoned from 1940 to 1945 at Oflag IX-A/Z in Rotenburg, Germany.

Other notable prisoners whose records are now online include, blue blood George Henry Hubert Lascelles. Lascelles – known as Viscount Harewood – was seventh in line to the throne when he was caught in 1944. He was sent to Colditz until the end of the war. He is now 40th in line.

Ancestry.co.uk is now offering a 14 day free trial to the service to get the general public to know more about the fascinating stories on WWII and its soldiers. The site claims to be the first-ever to open such archives to the public.

The Ancient Library of Alexandria was the largest and best-known human knowledge magnet of all times. It was built under the Ptolemaic dynasty around III century BC and destroyed under mysterious circumstances under the Roman ruling. Some say that maybe it was Julius Caesar itself who burned the library down.

The loss was of catastrophic proportions: something between 40.000 and 100.000 books have been destroyed, turning into ashes thousands of years of history, literature and world facts.

In the early Seventies the idea of reviving the old library started taking place and a specific committee was set up to discuss the project. The new Library of Alexandria was to rise exactly on the same spot where its predecessor was burned down centuries before: between the University’s campus and the seafront.

UNESCO, together with the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak gave the project full support. The Mediterranean was to be endowed with a new and great cultural center.

The library was inaugurated in 2002 and hosts approximately eight million books and features a 70.000 square meter reading room.

The rise, fall and rise again after so many centuries of the Library of Alexandria is probably the greatest, even though it is just one out of many, of the examples of the strong link that runs between humans and their culture, their heritage.

As soon as writing was invented life and its events have been registered. The supports have changed dramatically over time: rocks, wax boards, animal skins, paper…

Techniques have changed, but the aim was always that of preserving our memories.

Today computers are the evolution of the ancient papyrus that once filled Alexandria’s library. Producing and recording data has become technically faster and easier, flooding hard drives world round with information.

It is often difficult to understand the importance of a secure back-up of all these files, pictures and documents, of our life’s record.

Swiss DNA Bank is the ultimate tool for data recovery: a 21st century Library of Alexandria safely embedded in the Swiss Alps in a nuclear-proof shelter.

No modern Julius Caesar will break into this data storage facility!

On September 11th, 1984 Alec Jeffreys, now Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, discovered something called “genetic fingerprinting” in a laboratory in the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester. His discovery was to become the turning point for forensic DNA analysis, paternity tests and DNA cloning.

Professor Jeffreys and his team were working on DNA patters, overwhelmed by the number of variables present even between mother and son or identical twins. “This is too complicated”, thought Jeffreys, but then came came what he calls his “eureka” moment and realized that every DNA strain contains not only the information the organism has inherited from parents, but also its unique “fingerprint” trace which repeats itself in its every single cell. What initially appeared to be a random and confusing bulk of unlinked information information, was actually the individual’s distinctive feature.

This accidental discovery opened up a new area for science, making DNA analysis crucial for criminal investigation, paternity tests and diversity analysis also among non-human species. The first real legal case involving DNA fingerprints analysis came in March 1985. A family of UK citizens originally from Ghana was accused of child swapping because the youngest one flew back to Great Britain after a trip to their hometown on a damaged passport. Blood typing analysis concluded that the boy was part of the family but couldn’t be determined if he was the son or a nephew with no residence rights. This is where Professor Alec Jeffreys got involved and scientifically proved he was a full member of the family.

Another headline-making investigation, successfully concluded thanks to Professor’s Jeffreys work, was the identification of the remains of the Nazi criminal Josef Mengele. After the Second World War he fled from the Allies and escaped to South America, where he lived for the rest of his life without ever being caught. In 1996 the German government, keen to close the case, asked professor Jeffreys together with professor Erika Hagelberg, an expert in extracting DNA from bones, to analyze the remains of Wolfgang Gerhard, a man of German origins buried in the cemetery of a small Brazilian town. The man, who drowned some years earlier in a swimming accident, was proven with a 99.94% certainty to be Mengele.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery, the University of Leicester has organized various events and conferences to stretch once more the importance of Professor’s Jeffreys work. To read more about this, visit http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/genetics/jeffreys/

As paperwork quickly disappears from our drawers and digital data storing becomes increasingly crucial in everyday personal and business life, not everyone realizes how important could be to know where your back-up servers are physically located.

Think about all those letters you have on your web-mail provider account.

What happens if the service disappears for one reason or the other. Where or who can you turn to to recover them?

This might not be an issue one thinks about every day, but many Aussies might have had the taught last wednesday.

On Sept. 2nd, Australia disappeared from the www for a whole hour, between 7.50 and 8.50 am local time reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Telsta, by far the country’s number one ISP, suffered from a major crash which affected home, business and mobile  internet customers.

Telstra customers could not access any international sites or Australian sites containing international links. Since Telstra’s customers also include most down under ISPs, most of the country was affected.

The problem apparently was caused by Telstra’s international gateway, which lost the ability to find the domain names of international websites.

The technical difficulty was most likely solved with the classic home-style turn-off-turn-on-the-switch procedure.

No damage done, but we should all stop and think that even though our stuff feels like it’s on our computer, it’s actually not. Thousands of miles usually separate us from our mails, documents or pictures.

A safe data storage provider should be able to indicate precisely the server’s location and be transparent on panic data recovery procedure.

Sixteen years after the discovery of  the APOE4 gene, who’s mutation is the focus of Alzheimer’s research and treatment, two more genes have been pinpointed as implicated in the disease’s development.

Alzheimer’s disease - a degenerative disease, which slowly and progressively destroys brain cells. It is named after Aloïs Alzheimer, a German neurologist, who in 1907 first described the symptoms as well as the neuropathological features of Alzheimer’s disease such as plaques and tangles in the brain .

A UK team discovered that mutations in the CLU and PICALM genes, both known to have protective roles in the brain, increase by 20% the chance of developing Alzheimer’s. They basically turn from protectors into enemies of the brain’s health, even though the studies are still at an initial stage and the links between the genes and the disease are not quite clear yet.

Philippe Amouyel, an epidemiologist at the University of Lille in France and an author of one of the studies, says “that they may be involved in the elimination of the major component of amyloid plaques.” Buildup of these plaques is a major cause of Alzheimer’s.

The results of the study have been associated with the research on another genetic marker of the brain, responsible for the clearance of amyloid plaques. According to Julie Williams, professor of neuropsychological genetics at Cardiff University in Wales, this combination of discoveries forms an important breakthrough in the current impetus to discover the causes of Alzheimer’s disease”.

Today Alzheimer’s figures are increasing world-wide. According to the American 2009 Alzheimer’s report, in the US alone 5.5 million people suffer from this disease, growing at the speed of one new diagnosis every 70 seconds. Alzheimer recently became the 6th cause of death, surpassing diabetes.

In Europe, the estimated number of affected people, according to the Alzheimer Europe web site, is 7.3 million. These figures sets important challenges for all European health care systems, since the oldest old is one of the fastest growing sectors of European societies.

As for any other disease, an early diagnosis is the best way to treat and learn how to live with Alzheimer’s.

If we talk about “sandboxing”, happy memories of childhood games in the garden will come to mind.

But when talking about computers and applications, this term refers to a very powerful security feature that separates running programs. This is very important for service/application providers. Anyone that offers a web-based service is potentially under risk of being attacked by hackers or third parties interested in gaining the information that’s been transferred from the user to the server during uploading and vice versa during downloading.

When Swiss DNA Bank’s developing team was crating the application, the number one priority was always to give users the maximum level of security possible due to the company’s concern with the customers’ privacy issues.

The only way to provide 100% guarantees that the data would not be intercepted by malicious third parties was to rely on two separate servers: one on which the application is running and another one on which the data is stored. The two servers are completely independent and physically located in two different venues. The only connection occurs during data uploading and downloading, a phase in which everything is protected by the highest encryption standards.

In addition, the keys to decryption and the encrypted data are saved in physically separated machines, so that even if a system engineer gains access to one of the servers it is impossible for him to enter the Forever database.

Another plus of this security solution is that in case of an application crash occurs due to a very high number of access, there is no risk of data loss or damaging because everything is saved on the separate and highly secure Forever server.

The risk with the average available cloud computing (services which, like Swiss DNA Bank, provide a software that users access form a browser instead of downloading it on their computer), is that you do not know for sure wether the application and the data are on the same server and where the server is physically located. Since data can sometimes be backed-up on one’s computer but is usually hosted on the cloud, in case of a system crash there are no security guarantees concerning a safe back-up procedure.

Unlike most services, thanks to the multiple server solution and localized Forever data storage, Swiss DNA Bank is able to provide a 100% secure service for a risk-free storage.

Ten years from now every new-born will know wether he’ll suffer from diabetes in his teens or a heart condition in his fifties. Not from a pediatric psychic, that is not in sight yet, but from the analysis of the genetic code of the baby. The costs of DNA mapping have already sensibly diminished, but they will drop to less than $1000 in the near future, making this a standard after-birth procedure. The human Genome Project, the first human genome sequencing ever published was completed in 2001 at a cost of $4 billion. Two years ago scientists James Watson and Craig Venter had their genomes mapped with about $1m, and Dr. Stephen Quake, a Stanford engineer, recently decoded is own with less than $50,000 and just a three-member staff. Dr Jay Flately from Illumina, an American company specialized in personalized medicine development by applying innovative genetic technologies, stated in an interview with The Times that most kids will have this simple procedure done within 2019. It will be enough to collect a drop of blood with a heel-prick blood test, similar to the one that is already used to screen for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis. “The limitations are sociological; when and where people think it can be applied, the concerns people have about misinformation and the background ethics questions. I think those are actually going to be the limits that push it out to a ten-year timeframe” he said. This procedure will in fact raise eyebrows on privacy concerns: what if an insurance company manages to get its hands on your own sequenced genome and prices your health insurance accordingly? But, as Dr. Flatley added “people have to recognize that this horse is out of the barn, and that your genome probably can’t be protected, because everywhere you go you leave your genome behind.” A used coffee mug or a fallen out hair are enough to track a person’s DNA anyway. This is why it will be very important for proper legislation to be passed. The benefits will be so great that will most likely wipe out the initial concerns. Knowing which kind of cancer or cariovascular problems could affect us, is crucial to early prevention and drugs and dietary advice.

September 1st 2009 is a very important day in Swiss DNA Bank’s history. It’s the day the staff finally pulled the strings on a very intensive two-years project development. Everything came together and the “put-the-web-application-on-line-button” was pushed.

The dream of creating the first data and DNA forever banking service came to life.

The idea was always to create a bank, a Swiss bank, which followed each and every security and privacy policy of our country. But what was going to be sheltered in this bank was not money or bonds. Was something much more precious and unique: it was people’s memories and DNA.

As Swiss DNA Bank’s website often states, one’s life experience, knowledge and memories are the most important asset we have. It takes a lifetime to build them.

On the other hand, our DNA trace is something that belongs only to ourselves. The health information contained are crucial not only for the carrier, but also for it’s family. Knowing your biological ancestry can help you prevent or cure many disease. But at the end of one’s life these assets are most likely going to be lost. Our children, our grandchildren and the ones that will come after them are deprived of the chance of getting to know who we where, what we’ve done and what we’ve learned.

This is where the idea of the Perpetual Financial Engine comes from.

The Perpetual Financial Engine feature is the reason why Swiss DNA Bank’s service is Forever. As of today, there is no technological support that you are sure it will be readable in even just 10 or 15 years time. Think about a floppy disc or an audio cassette.

So we figured that the solution to perpetual data storage is not technological, but financial.

The Perpetual Financial Engine, together with a long-lasting and safe structure of a Swiss bank, is the key to being able of founding tomorrow’s technological support renewal.

The user’s subscription fee is partially invested in safe assets, such as Swiss government bonds, in order to guarantee a small revenue, year after year, which allows to keep our storing facilities up to date.

When this whole picture came together, it was time to think of a safe way to store it all. The solution fort the physical storage of the servers which contain the data came from the heart of the Swiss Alps, from a former military nuclear shelter which was converted into server hosting facility.

Once Swiss DNA Bank’s servers were safe behind closed steel doors, the attention turned to on-line security.

The web-development team figured that username and password were not enough to protect such sensible data. So each Swiss DNA Bank user is provided with a Swiss DNA Card, a credit card sized one-time access code generator. The one-time access code is the third field one has to fill to enter the Swiss DNA Bank web application, an amazing tool to organize memories, pictures, documents, and any other file you can think of.

Take a look at your desk. Open some drawers randomly. Check your computer’s desktop. And what about the office’s shelves? Unless you are one of those people naturally gifted with full organizational skills, at least one of those places is a real mess.

And if you are organized, this will be your ultimate tool!

Now you can store it all, safely and Forever.

http://www.swissdnabank.com/