Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Freddy MacKay:
Freddy flagged this article for us:
http://m.phys.org/news/2016-04-team-digital-images-dnaand-perfectly.html
All the movies, images, emails and other digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10,000 gigabytes) can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube. Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard. But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube. The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.
Fascinating – think of all the applications! And by applications, I mean plot bunnies. Go!