Willie Loman gets help from double helix

"Given a number of cities and the costs of traveling from any city to any other city, what is the cheapest round-trip route that visits each city exactly once and then returns to the starting city?" [Travelling salesman problem, Wikipedia.]

Well, don't despair, Mr. Loman, because DNA computing is on the rescue. DNA computing works like this:

Release thousands of DNA sequences into a pool, and the simple thermodynamics of hybridization means each strand will end up finding its partner. Thus the dream of DNA computing - massively parallelized by the ability of many, many small pieces to diffuse and hybridize in a solution. Via Madprime.org.

Uh, okay. Right... For those of us who like pictures, Discovery magazine offers a beautifully rendered comics: