Next Gen Storage: Your DNA

Your whole life is on that USB stick, from your data to your pictures to that awesome web development project. The sad truth is that these devices will not last. The solution being that data could be stored in something that we all already have: our DNA. So compact and complex are its strands that just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of containing all the data of internet giants such as Google and Facebook, with room to spare. DNA can be fossilized and preserved for thousands of years. So far, scientists have extracted and sequenced the genome of a 110,000-year-old polar bear and more recently a 700,000-year-old horse. The cost of encoding just 83Kb of data cost about $2,000, making it a relatively expensive process, but that price will come down over time. Advances in technology for medical analysis are likely to help with this. Just look at genome sequencing and how much the price has dropped. There is so much data being generated that it is not a question of how long it is stored but is there is enough room for it. This will be very interesting to see how it develops.