Technology, Biology | 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".

Harvard scientists have created a type of “cyborg” tissue for the first time by embedding a three-dimensional network of functional, biocompatible, nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues.

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules.