The human genome, the hereditary material we pass on to our progeny, can be cast as a 3 billion letter string over a DNA alphabet of four. We currently understand 1.5% of this mass, mostly in the form of genes, DNA substrings that code for proteins, the quintessential constituents of every living cell. The remainder 98.5% of our genome was often deemed as "junk". This picture changed when the genome of related species became available. By comparison we are suddenly able to pinpoint the locations of a staggering one million additional human subsequences that must be important to the human cell. The functions of these regions remain largely unknown, while their sheer volume overwhelms any comprehensive experimental approach. Guided by experimental results for handfuls of these subsequences, computational approaches can be employed to tackle the tremendous challenge of understanding this data and providing key biological observations. In this talk, I will describe ultraconserved elements, some of the most perplexing regions within the human genome, and track down a phenomenon of turning genomic junk into gold. The talk will assume no prior knowledge in Molecular Biology.