Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

Two scientists at the Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored a 700TB of data in DNA. 

To give you an idea of how big this is, it would mean more than 35000 years of HD video of YouTube (720p at 5kbps) into a single gram. HD video is indeed a diffcult thing to store, it is even mentionned in the video. This means it is almost 60000 times more dense than a 3TB hard drive and it should fail a lot less often.

While they were able to generate that amount of data, most of it was duplicated. DNA replication is really fast, encoding the data is however much slower. They don't extrapolate on the read time either. It is not tomorrow that we will have DNA USB keys, but for long-lasting and space-hungry data, it is very promising.

A rather long time ago, tape devices held a similar function. It is now pretty obsolete, but it made the first backups possible.

• Original source
• Original paper

Solving complex network problems using… fungus

Here is a part of a documentary on decay that aired on BBC.

The part I am talking about is at 1:03:45 and demonstrates a slime mold searching for its food, optimizing the network path between food sources and even creating some backup routes.

This is quite interesting considering that network resolution is a hard problem that requires quite a bit of processing.

P.s. The rest of the show is quite fascinating as well