A team from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has discovered a way to store 70 billion books in a space the size of your thumbnail! Using next-generation sequencing technology, the team managed to encode the library in DNA, shattering the record for DNA data by a factor of 1,000.
Scientists have long thought that DNA could make an excellent storage medium, as it is fantastically dense, stable, energy-efficient and proven to work over a timespan of some 3.5 billion years.
In theory, four grams of DNA could store all of the digital data humankind creates in one year. Well that would definitely save some storage space.
