The World's Ideal Storage Medium Is "Beyond Silicon"

The world is facing a data storage crisis. As information proliferates in everything from YouTube videos to astronomical images to emails, the need for storing that data is growing exponentially. If trends continue, data centers will have used up the world's microchip-grade silicon before 2040.

But there is another storage medium made of abundant atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. It's called DNA. And you wouldn't need much of it. The entire world's data could be s...