Massive Attack celebrated the 20th birthday of their album called Mezzanine by storing it in a digital form that would last forever. No one would hardly imagine that their digital record would be stored in DNA molecules.
The people at ETH Zurich developed this technology to preserve the integrity of information for hundreds to thousands of years. This was done under the supervision of Robert Grass and Reinhard Heckel. The two scientists explained that while information in digital media is stored in 0 and 1, in biology information is stored in the form of the building blocks of DNA.
The amount of data they had was too large to keep in their original format. For that reason they used Opus coding format. This is a highly-regarded software that compresses audio files. A company in the US is producing 920,000 short DNA helices which all together encompass the album. A Swiss company will then inject them into 5,000 tiny glass spheres. The project is expected to take about 2 months to complete.
The 5,000 glass spheres containing the Mezzanine will be stored in a water tank, with the possibility of water being removed at any time so that through DNA sequencing analysis we will be able to read the stored information.
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
