Biomimicry

"Our data-driven society is churning out more information than traditional storage technology can handle, so scientists are looking for a solution in Nature's hard drive: DNA. A pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center recently wrote a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, an Amazon gift card and other files into DNA strands and retrieved them without errors, according to a study published in the latest edition of Science."

"It looks like a test tube with dried salt at the bottom, but Microsoft says it could be the future of data storage. The company reported today that it had written roughly 200 megabytes of data, including War and Peace and 99 other literary classics, into DNA. Researchers have demonstrated that digital data can be stored in DNA before, but Microsoft says none have written so much of it into DNA at once. DNA is a good storage medium because data can be written into molecules more densely than the basic elements of conventional storage technologies can pack it in companies rely on today."