Solutions? We could either build six stacks of computer servers that would reach up to the moon (over 370,000 kilometers) or alternatively try to store all of this data in DNA molecules.
The latter option would save a ton of space, both in the digital and geographic sense of this term.
Scientists at UW came up with a new technology that would allow to "successfully encode four image files worth of digital data into the nucleotide sequences of snippets of synthetic DNA," Tech Times reported.
It seems surreal, but researchers retrieved the right sequences of encoded digital data from a DNA pool and reconstructed the four images without losing an information byte, the source said.
Digital data storage using DNA by Luis Henrique Ceze of University of Washington and… https://t.co/KUlHHMUzXs pic.twitter.com/ahanCZGJqu
— Naesstrom (@Naesstrom) 4 декабря 2015 г.
"Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works — it's very, very compact and very durable," said Luis Ceze, one of the scientists who worked on the project, as cited by Science Alert.
In the future giant server farms will not have to be built to store data, with DNA data coding billions of gigabytes could be squashed into a space the size of an apple.
