This one has nothing to do with politics but it does hit my own personal trifecta in that it has a biology element, a photography element and a big nerd element.

Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard.

But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.

www.washington.edu

The storage device is DNA and the technique looks to be good for storing data for centuries with no information loss. This is where it gets really good. A drop of DNA roughly the size of the tip of pencil will store 10,000GB (1,000 Terrabytes) of data. Roughly a thousand times more than a standard computer hard drive.

“We’re essentially repurposing it to store digital data — pictures, videos, documents — in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years,” the scientists say. All the digital data worldwide is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020, so scientists are scrambling for data storage solutions that are more efficient and more stable than current options.

Current digital data storage options (e.g. discs, flash drives, and hard drives) generally have life spans measured in decades, but DNA can preserve data for centuries.

http://petapixel.com

Four photographs were successfully stored on DNA snippets then retrieved without the loss of a single byte.