jmacavali
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DNA used as storage. Sounds awesome, if not really expensive.
http://mashable.com/2013/01/23/dna-replace-hard-drive/
Researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, U.K., have demonstrated a new method for reliably encoding several common computer file formats this way. As the price of sequencing and synthesizing DNA continues to drop, the researchers estimate, this biological storage medium will be competitive within the next few decades.
The U.K. researchers encoded DNA with an MP3 of Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream†speech, a PDF of a scientific paper, an ASCII text file of Shakespeare's sonnets, and a JPEG color photograph. The storage density of the DNA files is about 2.2 petabytes per gram.
Goldman's group estimates that encoding data in DNA currently costs $12,400 per megabyte, plus $220 per megabyte to read that data back. If the price of DNA synthesis comes down by two orders of magnitude, as it is expected to do in the next decade, says Goldman, DNA data storage will soon cost less than archiving data on magnetic tapes.
http://mashable.com/2013/01/23/dna-replace-hard-drive/