Information Storage And Retrieval

Rising over the battered surface of the moon, Earth loomed in a shimmering arc covered in a swirling skin of clouds. The image, taken in 1966 by NASA's robotic probe Lunar Orbiter 1, presented a stunning juxtaposition of planet and moon that no earthling had ever seen before. It was dubbed the Picture of the Century. "The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," remembered Keith Cowing, who saw it as an 11-year-old and credited it with eventually luring him to work for NASA.

Frustrated by a slow and antiquated computer system, the city of Los Angeles is weighing a plan to replace its e-mail and records retention software with a service provided by Google, a move that could allow the Internet giant to retain sensitive records transmitted by the police and other municipal agencies.

Responding to a long-running pattern of child abuse deaths that might have been prevented, Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday will consider a renewed attempt to ease communication among agencies that deal with troubled families. The proposal calls for an interlinked computer system that would expand child abuse investigators' ability to access records showing a family's criminal, educational and medical histories, including critical clues about dangers faced by children.

The Orange County district attorney's office has nearly quadrupled its DNA database over the last nine months, to about 15,000 individual profiles, and officials say they hope to start using it to identify criminal suspects by early next year. The agency's effort to build a database exempt from the rules that govern state and national DNA repositories has made Orange County unique among local governments in California. Much of the rapid growth has come from cases in which prosecutors drop charges against low-level offenders who agree to submit DNA samples.

Twelve years after a Silver Lake man died, his pharmacy receipts and medical bills sit in a Los Angeles archive with a hand-written message declaring: "The Cost of AIDS." In a San Francisco library, a massive photo collection capturing the exuberance of gay liberation in the 1970s and its tragic collision with AIDS fills many cartons.

EMC Corp., the world's biggest maker of storage computers, introduced Tuesday a service that lets companies back up information on their personal computers over the Internet. EMC is pushing into software and services and away from reliance on less-profitable storage computers to spur growth. Chief Executive Joseph Tucci has spent $8 billion buying software companies in the last four years. The service uses software from Berkeley Data Systems, which EMC bought in October.

Web search company Google Inc. is collaborating with Cleveland Clinic, one of the premier U.S. health institutions, to pilot an exchange of data that puts patients in charge of their own medical records. The healthcare industry has been trying to usher in a paperless era for more than a decade, holding out the promise that electronic medical records would bring significant cost savings. Currently, only a tiny minority of hospitals and primary care physicians use electronic medical records.

Two members of the Los Angeles City Council called Monday on City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo to explain why an inventory of the city's billboards does not exist, six years after the council first voted to compile one. Jack Weiss and Wendy Greuel said billboard companies have circumvented the council's desire to create a database, part of a larger effort to determine the number of billboards that have been erected or expanded illegally.

The last two years have seen an exponential increase in the rate of gene discovery, thanks in large part to the advancements in so-called genotyping chip technology. These small glass or silicon platforms have made quick and easy work of simultaneously analyzing hundreds of thousands of genetic variations that exist in the human genome. The screens detect single-letter changes in the DNA code known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced "snips").

Ruling in a "cold hit" murder case, the California Supreme Court decided Monday that prosecutors may tell juries in all cases of the rarity of finding a defendant's DNA "match" in the general population even when a database search has increased the likelihood. The decision, written by Justice Ming W.