Scientists have found a way to preserve
the world's data for millions of years, by
storing it on a tiny strand of DNA
preserved in glass.
When you think of humanity’s legacy, the most
powerful message for us to leave behind for
future civilisations would surely be our billions of
terabytes of data. But right now the hard drives
and discs that we use to store all this information
are frustratingly vulnerable, and unlikely to survive more than a couple of hundred years. Fortunately scientists have built a DNA time
capsule that's capable of safely preserving all of
our data for more than a million years. And
we’re kind of freaking out over how huge the
implications are. Researchers already knew that DNA was ideal
for data storage. In theory, just 1 gram of DNA is
capable of holding 455 exabytes, which is the
equivalent of one billion gigabytes, and more
than enough space to store all of Google,
Facebook and pretty much everyone else's data. Storing information on DNA is also surprisingly
simple - researchers just need to program the A
and C base pairs of DNA as a binary '0', and the T
and G as a '1'. But the researchers, led by Robert
Grass from ETH Zürich in Switzerland, wanted to
find out just how long this data would last. DNA can definitely be durable - in 2013 scientists managed to sequence genetic code from 700,000-year-old horse bones - but it has to be
preserved in pretty specific conditions,
otherwise it can change and break down as it's
exposed to the environment. So Glass's team
decided to try to replicate a fossil, to see if it
would help them create a long-lasting DNA hard drive. "Similar to these bones, we wanted to protect
the information-bearing DNA with a synthetic
'fossil' shell," explained Grass in a press release. In order to do that, the team encoded
Switzerland’s Federal Charter of 1921 and The
Methods of Mechanical Theorems by Archimedes
onto a DNA strand - a total of 83 kilobytes of
data. They then encapsulated the DNA into tiny
glass spheres, which were around 150 nanometres in diameter. The researchers compared these glass spheres
against other packaging methods by exposing
them to temperatures of between 60 and 70
degrees Celsius - conditions that replicated the
chemical degradation that would usually occur
over hundreds of years, all crammed into a few destructive weeks. They found that even after this sped-up
degradation process, the DNA inside the glass
spheres could easily be extracted using a
fluoride solution, and the data on it could still be
read. In fact, these glass casings seem to work
much like fossilised bones. Based on their results, which have been published in Angewandte Chemie , the team predicts that data stored on DNA could survive
over a million years if it was stored in
temperatures below -18 degrees Celsius, for
example, in a facility like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is also known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. They say it could last
2,000 years if stored somewhere less secure at
10 degrees Celsius - a similar average
temperature to central Europe. The tricky part of this whole process is that the
data stored in DNA needs to be read properly in
order for future civilisations to be able to access
it. And despite advances in sequencing
technology, errors still arise from DNA
sequencing. The team overcame this by embedding a method
for correcting any errors within the glass
spheres, based on the Reed-Solomon Codes,
which help researchers transmit data over long
distances. Basically, additional information is
attached to the actual data, to help people read it on the other end. This worked so well that even after the test DNA
had been kept in scorching and degrading
conditions for a month, the team could still read
Switzerland’s Federal Charter and
Archimedes’ wise words at the end of the
study. The other major problem, which is not so easy to
overcome, is the fact that storing information on
DNA is still extremely expensive - it cost around
US$1,500 just to encode the 83 kilobytes of data
used in this study. Hopefully this cost will go
down as we get better at writing information onto DNA. Rsearchers out there are already
storing books onto DNA, and the band OK Go are also writing their new album into genetic information. The question is, what would Grass store, now
that he’s developed this mind-blowing time
capsule? The documents in Unesco’s Memory
of the World Programme, and… Wikipedia, he
says. “Many entries are described in detail, others
less so. This probably provides a good overview
of what our society knows, what occupies it and
to what extent,” said Grass in the release. It’s ridiculously cool to think that even if we do
wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth, our
civilisation might still live on for millennia to
come in the form of Wikipedia pages and
Facebook updates. We really are (almost) infinite.

wow. .....weldone researchers

I don't know why thread from computer section on nairaland hardly make FP A thread like this is to be on FP

I wan pee

Orisirisi for we land

An invention dat why will trigger a whole loads of other ideas....i hope they try time travel....