A bench scientist or an engineer will tell you the same thing: the distinction between “science” and “technology” is important. Science is more about the undirected search for answers to questions about how the natural world works. Technology is more about the directed application of tools, methods, or even scientific processes to expand human capabilities. The two inevitably overlap, but if science is about figuring out how things work, then technology is simply making them work. But in James Gleick’s latest book, he masterfully describes the historical and theoretical foundations of the field that knits science and technology together, or perhaps encompasses them both: information theory.

He draws an arc from the earliest forms of human communication that aimed to compress time and distance–writing, counting, African drumming–all the way to late-20th-century quantum mechanics. But this connection is not a starry-eyed tendril that college students might invent around a dining hall table. The story he plows through Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculating machine; 19th-century telegraph economics; Claude Shannon’s seminal 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”; and the thicket of contemporary genetic computation is thrilling, riveting, and breathtaking.

The best episodes of the idiosyncratic BBC show, “Connections,” follow science historian James Burke as he cannonballs from one cultural innovation to another. Just a sampling from one Wikipedia show summary: “The search for artificial quinine to treat malaria led to the development of artificial dyes, which Germany used to produce fertilizers to grow wheat and led to the advancement of chemistry which in turn led to DuPont’s discovery of polymers such as nylon.” In a similar manner, though with more technical depth, Gleick weaves together Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

For a concrete example of how powerful these connections are, consider his explanation of how the uncertainty principle influences quantum teleportation–via information. In short, an atom can release two “entangled” quantum particles, for instance two photons with the same spin. These photos can fly off in opposite directions, indefinitely, and they will forever share the same spin–one way of looking at this is that they will carrying an identical bit of information, encoded in the spin. The uncertainty principle dictates that “when you measure any property of a quantum object, you thereby lose the ability to measure a complimentary property”–you can know the particle’s momentum, or its velocity, but you cannot know both. But the properties of entangled particles are fixed, thought they remain unknown until an observer measures them. So if two such particles are on opposite sides of the galaxy, and we measure the spin of one, we immediately know and fix permanently the spin of the other particle–a transfer of state that appears to happen faster than light. The paradox seems to violate the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And indeed, nothing can, because what must actually travel from one particle’s location to the next to convey the other’s spin is information. And information cannot travel faster than light–so the spin is never “fixed” or “teleported” to the distant location until the information about it arrives.

Every once in a while, I am truly awed and amazed by the new intellectual soil cultivated by a writer. This sometimes happens in the areas of science writing, a field I have turned to often in the past few years. But The Information is truly remarkable in the depth and reach of the connections it conveys in exciting, imaginative prose. I could not recommend a non-fiction work more.

Tomorrow is National DNA Day, in commemoration of the 1953 discovery of the molecule’s double helix structure and the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project. But while the focus of the government-conceived holiday is on the DNA of one familiar species, homo sapiens, there are some other genomes worth considering on a day devoted to nucleic acid.

The Human Genome Project, as I learned researching for an interview on genetic testing with Nancy Spinner, began in 1990 and was originally planned to take 15 years. Advances in sequencing technology moved so quickly that the project finished two years early. In 2005, the NSF, USDA, and DOE funded a project at Washington University and Iowa State University to sequence the maize genome. The two institutions published a draft of the genome in February of this year.

News of the corn genetic sequencing arrived the same week the Svalbard Seed Vault opened in Norway—a coincidence I noted on Science Progress. Each project represents different but complementary approaches to plant genetic resources: the sequencing an understanding and control over biological materials, the seed bank a commitment to the preservation of biodiversity.

But in light of some of the most complicated global resource problems of late—soaring energy and food prices, and competition between crops grown for food, fuel, and feed—DNA day could be a moment to reflect on the sustainability of genetic resources beyond our own.

The Senate today passed the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act, designed to protect patients from abuses of their genetic information by insurance companies or employers. Cutting people from insurance rolls is one possible scary use of genetic information that is getting easier to obtain. Another is the reckless creation of synthetic organisms (like nasty pathogens) from readily available cassettes of DNA—which enabled the construction of the first artificial bacteria genome at the Craig Venter Institute just a few months ago.

But what does Venter plan to do with those engineered microbes? Make biofuels.

The point being that understanding and celebrating achievements in genetics isn’t just going to make us healthier. Genetics already plays a significant role in determining what we eat—and that role will only increase—but DNA will also shape the fuel we use to move that food around.