Microsoft has found a way to create a data storage device that can store an almost unlimited amount of information for an arbitrarily long period, reports The Next Web.
The new type of storage will be based on 10 million long oligonucleotides with DNA molecules. Twist Bioscience was the supplier of the "material".
According to Microsoft representatives, only 20 grams of molecules can be used to write all digital data created to date on such a "flash drive". Moreover, it will be possible to read them even after several thousand years.
Information in the new drives will be encoded using not two bits, but as many as four. The bits will be nucleotides - A, C, T and G.
The Next Web notes that the cost of the technology needed to work with DNA has dropped significantly in recent years. So, in 2003, in order to decipher the human genome with a length of about three billion nucleotides, scientists spent more than a billion dollars on research. Now reading DNA costs about a thousand dollars, the newspaper writes.
