Interesting news for vintage lovers; it seems that soon audio cassetteslong since surpassed by other more practical and capacious devices, will return to the market. What made this possible was the ingenuity of a group of Chinese researchers, who gave new life to a tool now considered obsolete.
The news comes from Southern University, in China. Researchers have created a new, completely biological device that uses Synthetic DNA to store all kinds of information. All contained in an instrument that has the shape of an old audio cassette. What scientists promise is something incredible, and captivating: in theory, the device should be able to store approx 375 petabytes of data. An enormous number to say the least. Just think that a petabyte is equivalent to a thousand terabytes, or a million gigabytes.
This infinite “cassette” was created by the group led by Xingyu Jiang, professor of Southern University of Science and Technology of Shenzhen. The prototype of the object will be published on Science Advances. The device is composed of a tape made of polyester-nylon, on which very small barcodes are located, with 545,000 partitions per kilometer. In each partition there are synthetic DNA molecules: the new bits.
The memory capacity, therefore, is undoubted. But what could it be? speed of a tool that contains so much data? Apparently slowness is actually a problem. It seems that to recover 156 kilobytes it takes about 150 minutes. However, it is an instrument still under study, and scientists are optimistic. There should be a way to reduce the time by at least a third.
Beyond the problems (about
which it is still possible to work on) it seems that there is really a lot of attention for this new cassette, so much so Microsoft he had already purchased 10 million bases of synthetic DNA for this very purpose.