We've seen storage media go from 8-inch floppy discs capable of storing 80 kilobytes of data to portable drives that now hold terabytes. But despite the vast increases in storage capacity over the last quarter century, the next step in the evolution of data management could be powered by a completely different and yet familiar medium DNA.
Just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of holding 455 exabytes enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, with room to spare. It's also durable. DNA has been extracted and sequenced from 700,000-year-old horse bones, according to Jacob Aron at the New Scientist.
Swiss scientists have been experimenting with DNA storage and find that data in DNA form could last 2000 years if kept at a temperature of around 10 °C. Of course, it's still on the expensive side, but that should change if the tech takes off.
For more: newscientist.com
No comments:
Post a Comment