Biology, Dna | featured news

With the reams of digital data we’re creating, there’s an immense potential for DNA to be a stable, long-term archive for ordinary information, such as photographs, books, financial records, medical files, and videos—all of which today are stored as computer code on fallible, power-hungry storage devices that, unlike DNA, become obsolete.

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".

That wonder molecule of life on Earth, DNA, is now being enlisted in the search for an exotic species zooming through the cosmos: dark matter... As far back as the 1930s, astronomers watching distant galaxies saw that something was missing: There were not enough stars to account for the heavy gravity needed to whirl galaxies so quickly or smash them together so swiftly.