Recently, researchers have looked to DNA as a method to store large amounts of digital information that are currently saved on hard drives. While a hard drive uses zeros and ones to represent data, the DNA code is written in sequences of four chemical nucleotides.
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The team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology located in Zurich also says that they are successful in encoding images, video and even audio tracks with this DNA method and they claim that this long term storage can store anything safely in digital binary code. DNA has a vast capacity to store unlimited data. Recent reports have demonstrated that information can be encapsulated on DNA structures, equaling 2000 years in storage with no errors after the data is retrieved and decoded.
“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it”, he said in Feb 2015.
The encoded DNA contained only a small amount of data – about 80 kilobytes of text from the work of Archimedes and Swiss National Charter. DNA storage does not require a constant supply of electricity, but other no-power archiving materials – magnetic tape, say – tends to degrade within a decade.
That equates to around two millennia at 50 degrees, the researchers say, yet when the data was retrieved and decoded it was complete and error-free. While a single droplet of DNA can hold more than 300,000 terabytes of information, the DNA can also last for hundreds to thousands of years.
Computer hard drives lack durability hence scientists are turning to DNA to store the digital information as well as preserve the knowledge for posterity.
. As experts state, an external hard drive equal to the size of a paperback book could back up no more than 5 terabytes of information which would last for only 50 years. The concept was first spoken of at the 250th meeting of the American Chemical Society.
DNA holds significant advantages over hard drives, in the bigger picture.
“For those who return to medieval occasions in Europe, we had monks writing in books to transmit info for the longer term, and a few of these books nonetheless exist”, says Robert Grass, Ph.D. Furthermore, DNA from hundreds of thousands of years ago can still be sequenced today.
Like many applied sciences of their early years, DNA storage comes with a hefty price ticket.
The team of researchers are already devising ways and means to label specific clusters of information on DNA strands in order to make them searchable.
There’s one storage medium that still kicks the crap out of our state-of-the-art solid state, and humans didn’t invent it. It’s called DNA.
The cost of storage is also an issue thus far, as it would take thousands of dollars to encode and store only a few megabytes of data.
Right now, we can read everything that’s in that drop.
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For some of us, we wouldn’t mind losing digital data from our past (I’m looking at you, Myspace and old Xanga blogs from middle school); much of the information we do save that may be necessary in the future can really benefit from this new technology. “But I can’t point to a specific place within the drop and read only one file”, he added.
