We're bombarded with information worth of 174 newspapers every day

Almaty. February 15. Kazakhstan Today - We are bombarded with information worth of 174 newspapers every day via television, emails and post, scientists said, Kazakhstan Today reports.

Scientists found that mankind broadcasts two quadrillion megabytes - or two followed by 21 zeroes - of information through televisions, radios, newspapers, post and emails every 12 months, Daily Mail reported.

That's the equivalent of every person in the world having to read 174 newspapers from cover to cover every single day.

The study also found that the world's libraries, computers, DVD collections and newspapers store a staggering 295trillion megabytes of information - or 295 followed by 18 zeroes.

If those 295 'exabytes' of stored information were kept on CD-Roms, the stack of CDs would reach from the Earth to beyond the Moon.

Dr Martin Hilbert of the University of South California, who carried out the study, said the 295trillion megabytes of information stored in the whole world is still less than one per cent of the information stored in all the DNA in a single human being.

Dr Hilbert estimated the amount of information stored by mankind in bytes - the unit of memory used by computers. A megabyte is a million bytes, while a gigabyte is a trillion bytes.

A top of the range iPod can store 160 gigabytes of data while a mid-priced desk top computers can store one terabyte - or trillion - bytes of data.

Dr Hilbert estimated how much information can be stored in books, newspapers, television shows, X-rays, LPs, photographs, VHS tapes and movies and converted it to bytes.

He also looked at digital storage in floppy disks, computer hard discs, memory cards, DVDs, CDs, digital cameras, mobile phones and portable music players.

He found that two-way communication technology - such as mobile phones and the internet - allowed people to share 65 trillion megabytes of data in 2007 - the equivalent of every person in the world communicating the contents of six newspapers every day.

He found that the world's ability to store information has grown at 28 per cent a year since 1986, while the ability to broadcast data as gone up by six per cent a year.

The shift from traditional to digital storage has been rapid. In 2000 around 75 per cent of the world's stored information was in analogue media such as paper, books and videotape. By by 2007 around 94 per cent was in digital format.

The study also estimates that the capacity of the world's general-purpose computers such as PCs and mobile phones has doubled every 18 months.

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