Scientists in Switzerland have developed a method to “write” huge amounts of DNA information and a new way to store it. According to Reuters, the researchers plan to store the DNA information in “synthetic fossils” which could potentially survive thousands of years: In past centuries, books and scrolls preserved the knowledge of our ancestors, even though they were prone to damage and disintegration. In the digital era, most of humanity’s collective knowledge is stored on servers and hard drives. But these have a limited lifespan and need constant maintenance. Scientists from ETH Zurich have taken inspiration from the natural world in a bid to devise a storage medium that could last for potentially thousands of years. They say that genetic material found in fossils hundreds of thousands of years old can be isolated and analyzed as it has been protected from environmental stresses. “(The) fascination of having this very, extremely old information – a hundred thousand years, older than anything else humanity knows – in DNA. So it kind of tells us that it’s a really stable material which can endure nature or the environment for a very long time,” said Dr. Robert Grass, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich’s [...]