Scientists recently encoded data in what highly efficient storage vehicle?

The data from more than 600 smartphones (10,000 GB) could be stored in a single drop of blood, according to a team of scientists from the University of Washington and Microsoft, all of whom shared this data storage technique at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.

According to the team, who detailed the information in a paper (PDF), digital data that filled an entire Walmart Super Center could be kept in a DNA storage device the size of a sugar cube.

In their research, the team took the digital data from four image files and encoded it into a nucleotide sequence in synthetic DNA. Then they retrieved the data and found image reconstruction was possible — with no data lost.