Japanese use bacteria to store data
‘These days, data get stored on disks, computer chips, hard drives and good old-fashioned paper.
Scientists in Japan see something far smaller but more durable – bacteria.
The four characters – T, C, A and G – that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much like digital data.
Character combinations can stand for specific letters and symbols – so codes in genomes can be translated, or read, to produce music, text, video and other content.
While ink may fade and computers may crash, bacterial information lasts as long as a species stays alive – possibly a mind-boggling million years – according to Professor Masaru Tomita, who heads the team of researchers at Keio University.’
