DNA Tapes: Revolutionizing Information Storage Beyond Standard Cassettes
Jiankai Li et al. 2025
In an innovative revival of 1960s technology, researchers have created a cassette tape that utilizes DNA for encoding information, substituting traditional iron oxide with synthetic DNA molecules printed onto plastic tape.
This groundbreaking technology boasts an astounding capacity for storing information. While conventional cassette tapes typically hold about 12 songs per side, DNA tapes can encapsulate every song ever recorded.
With a capacity of 10 megabytes per song, 100 meters of DNA cassette tape can accommodate over 3 billion songs. In total, the storage potential is a staggering 36 petabytes, equal to 36,000 terabytes of hard drive space.
Led by Jiang Xinyu and his team at Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, these cassettes are engineered to represent digital data through the sequencing of DNA bases (A, T, C, G) much like binary code in computers. This enables the storage of various digital files, including text, images, audio, and video.
The researchers were thrilled by the public’s reaction following the announcement of the DNA cassette. New Scientist reported Jiang stating, “The diverse feedback we’ve received from scientists, artists, engineers, and educators has been rewarding, inspiring many to rethink the intersection of data, biology, and technology.”
The project team’s next objective is to create a specialized reading/writing mechanism for DNA cassettes that emulates the function of traditional magnetic tape drives. “Our new ‘head’ design will precisely align the DNA tape in a reaction chamber for chemical processes like reading and rewriting,” Jiang explains.
They anticipate that DNA cassette tapes could be available commercially within five years. “Our exploration of DNA cassette tape technology transcends mere storage capability; it encompasses a reimagining of how information exists in both physical and biological forms,” Jiang concludes.
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There is Estimated genetic differences of 1.5 million Between wool mammoth and an Asian elephant. Colossal Biosciences, a company that seeks to revive extinct species through genetic engineering, now makes mice with “mammoth-like” fur, each with up to five genetic changes. It seems there's still a way to go.
Certainly, these mice have long, curly hair and blonde hair. In that way, it resembles a wool mammoth coat stored in permafrost. However, it is not clear that bringing the same genetic alterations in Asian elephants with far fewer hairs per area of the skin will result in similar results.
“The work done with these mice doesn't mean there's a solution ready to regain the huge phenotype,” says team members. I love Darren At Stockholm University in Sweden, on the Scientific Advisory Committee of Corosal. “As you point out, we also need to understand how to grow more fur.”
Creating an Asian elephant with these genetic changes would also be much more difficult than doing it in a mouse. “Engineering mutations in mice are an established process and are not particularly challenging.” Dusko Ilic King's College London.
Mouse that has been fixed and unfixed
Huge
Techniques that work in mice often fail in other species, and the size of elephants and their slow breeding significantly increases the time and cost involved. “These methods have not been developed for elephants. They are not easy based on anatomy.” Vincent Lynch At Buffalo University, New York. “That's probably the biggest challenge.”
However, Lynch is undoubtedly achievable. surely, Thomas Hildebrandt At the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany – Another giant advisor – New Scientist His team is the first time they've collected eggs from elephants, but the results have not yet been made public. Egg collection is an important step in IVF and is a genetic modification of mammals.
So how did Colossal make a “mammoth” mouse? Researchers began by looking for known mutations in mice that looked like fur. “[T]The majority of these genes were selected based on previous observations of the coat phenotype in mice,” read in a paper published today, which has not been peer-reviewed.
They identified eight genes that affect patterns (curse), color and hair length when disabled in mice. According to Colossal, one of these eight is a mammoth and is naturally disabled.
From the mammoth genome, the team identified small mutations that are thought to affect hair patterns, along with another disordered gene involved in fat metabolism.
The company then tried to modify these genes in mice. For example, one experiment used CRISPR gene editing to attempt to disable five of these genes in fertilized eggs. From 134 edited eggs, 11 puppies were born, and one of these puppies invalidated copies of both five genes.
Fur stored in frozen mammoth rank
Arami Stock Photo
In another study, the researchers used a form of CRISPR called base editing to abolish several genes in embryonic mouse stem cells. They combined this with another technique called homologous recombination to create the exact mutations found in the mammoth genome. Make accurate changes is much more difficult than disabling genes, but the recombination method works well only in the mouse.
The team then sequenced the cells to identify cells with the desired change and injected into mouse embryos to create chimeric mice. Of the 90 injected embryos, seven mice were born with four intended changes.
These experiments can be said to be successful in producing several mice with desirable physical changes in the fur, but only one genetic change is in exact agreement with what is found in the mammoth genome. It takes more work to achieve Colossal's stated purpose With the creation of “a cold-resistant elephant with all the core biological properties of wool mammoths,” and the elephant pregnancy lasting for about two years, Colossal is in time for a spontaneous 2028 deadline.
“Elephants with fur are not mammoths in the way we think of them.” Juan Antonio Rodriguez At the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He says many of the 1.5 million differences between the mammoth and the Asian elephant genome may not be effective, but it is not clear which is more important.
Even if we did, it's dangerous to make broader changes, says Rodriguez. “The more things change in organisms, the more likely they are to tinker with major metabolic pathways and genes.”
TThe weather was distinctly Scottish during the holidays, so instead of attending the planned party, my family and I stayed home to celebrate Hogmanay. Our youngest son’s friends and their parents joined us for dinner. As the kids in our group started getting rowdy around 9pm, we decided to host a mini midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing.
I hadn’t played Animal Crossing since lockdown. Taking care of my virtual island kept me sane while stuck in my small apartment with a baby, toddler, and teenager. Our guests brought their Switch, so we created avatars for the kids to enjoy new games together at our year-end party.
They had fun chasing each other with bug nets for a while, then gathered in the plaza with other island residents to watch a giant countdown clock while Tom Nook, the raccoon king of the island, wore party gear. On New Year’s Eve 2021, a memory struck me. Even though I was alone on the couch, I felt accompanied by my Animal Crossing friends as we watched the countdown together. My youngest son had just started walking and was unsteady on his feet. Seeing him interact with his brother, eager to stay up late, felt surreal.
It’s always surreal to watch kids discover and enjoy video games. Their presence changes the game, reshaping my memories of playing it alone or with new save files. Last year we all started playing Pokemon together, which added a new layer of enjoyment to a game I loved as a child. Super Mario 3D World feels like a completely different game when played with my kids, with their reactions and interactions shaping the experience.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening has been remade on Switch. Photo: Nintendo
Recently, my youngest son wanted to try a Zelda game, so we played Link’s Awakening on Switch. Despite my past difficult memories associated with the game, it was heartwarming to see my son navigate the game with joy and excitement.
To my parents, video games were unfamiliar and slightly suspect. Now, I act as a guide for my kids, introducing them to the worlds within the screen that fascinate them.
In the future, if our gaming interests diverge, I may become a tourist in their gaming world. For now, Animal Crossing remains a constant. I resurrected our family island for the kids to manage, pulling out my old Switch Lite. The island served as a refuge for our children during lockdown, a product of hours of labor that is now in need of revitalization. Despite my hesitations, my kids want to return and create something new.
oh
On my desk, next to my ultra-modern gaming PC, sits a strange device that resembles a spaceship control panel from a 1970s sci-fi movie. There’s no keyboard or monitor, just a few rows of colorful switches beneath a string of blinking lights. If you thought the recent proliferation of retro video game consoles, such as the Mini SNES and the Mega Drive Mini, was an amazing development in technology nostalgia, look no further than the PiDP-10. It’s a 2/3-scale replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer, first introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1966. It was designed and built by an international group of computer enthusiasts known as the PiDP-10. Obsolescence is certain
It’s a beautiful thing.
The project’s genesis dates back to 2015, when Oscar Vermeulen, a Dutch economist and lifelong computer collector, wanted to build a single replica of the PDP-8 mainframe that had fascinated him since childhood. “I had a Commodore 64 and proudly showed it to a friend of my father’s,” Vermeulen says. “He scoffed and said the Commodore was a toy. The real computer was the PDP, specifically the PDP-8. So I started looking for discarded PDP-8 computers, but I couldn’t find a single one. Now they’re collector’s items, very expensive and most of the time broken. So I decided to build a replica for myself.”
Ever the perfectionist, Vermeulen decided he needed a professionally made front panel cover. “The company that could make them told me I’d have to pay for one four-square-metre sheet of Perspex to cover 50 of these panels,” Vermeulen says. “So I made 49 extra ones, thinking I’d find 49 idiots to do it for me. Little did I know it would end up costing me thousands of dollars on my dinner table.”
At the same time, Vermeulen began posting in various vintage computing Google Groups, where he worked on software emulators for pre-microprocessor computers. As word spread about his replica, it quickly became a group effort that now has over 100 members. While Vermeulen focuses on designing the hardware replica (a front panel with working switches and lights), others are working on different aspects of the open source software emulation, which has a complicated history. At its core is SIMH, created by the ex-SIMH. December Developed by employee and megastar hacker Bob Supnick, the program emulates a variety of classic computers, and it was later improved by Richard Cornwell and Lars Brinkhoff to add driver support for the PDP-10. the Many other people were involved in the operating system and other MIT projects, some of whom collected and preserved old backup tapes, some of whom added improvements and debugging, and some of whom provided documentation and schematics.
Happy hacking! …PiDP-10 replica computer in Keith Stewart’s game room Photo: Keith Stewart/The Guardian
The attention to detail is incredible. The lights on the front aren’t just decorative. They show the instructions being executed, CPU signals, and memory contents, just like the original machine. Vermeulen calls it watching the heartbeat of the computer. This element was taken very seriously. “Two people spent months on one particular problem,” Vermeulen says. “You know, LEDs blink, but incandescent bulbs glow. So we studied exhaustively the LEDs to simulate the glow of the original bulbs. And we found that different bulbs from different years glow for different amounts of time. Measurements were made and calculations were applied, but the glow of the lamps was added. More CPU time was spent simulating that than simulating the original.”
Why? Why go to all this trouble? First, there’s the historical importance. The PDP machines, built between 1959 and the early 1970s, were revolutionary. Not only were they much cheaper than the giant mainframes used by the military and big corporations, but they were designed to be general-purpose, fully interactive machines. Instead of writing a program on punch cards, giving it to the IT department to run on the computer, print it out, and debug it maybe a day later, PDP let you type directly into the computer and test the results immediately.
A tedious task… In the 1950s, before the advent of PDP machines, mainframe computers took up entire rooms and used punch cards to input computer programs. Photo: Pictorial Parade/Getty Images
These factors led to an explosion of experimentation. Most modern programming languages, including C, were developed on DEC machines. The PDP-10 was the heart of the MIT AI Lab, the room where the term artificial intelligence was born. “The PDP-10 computer dominated the Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet,” says Lars Brinkhoff. “Internet protocols were prototyped on the PDP-10, PDP-11, and other computers. The GNU Project was inspired by the free sharing of software and information on the PDP-10. Stephen Hawking’s artificial voice grew out of the DECtalk device, which grew out of Dennis Klatt’s speech synthesis research begun on the PDP-9.”
The PDP made its way into university labs around the world, where it was embraced by a new generation of engineers, scientists, and programmers — the original computer hackers. Steve Wozniak got his start programming on a PDP-8, a small, inexpensive machine that sold by the thousands to hobbyists. Its operating system, OS/8, was the precursor to MS-DOS. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were teenage students who would sneak into the University of Washington to program the PCP-10, and it was on a PDP computer that MIT student Steve Russell and a group of friends designed a shoot-’em-up game. Space War!was one of the first video games to run on a computer.
Pioneers… Steve Russell at the California Computer History Museum, 2011. Russell stands in front of the Digital PDP-1, a computer game he developed in the early 1960s. Photo: MediaNews Group/The Mercury News/Getty Images
This legendary game wasn’t the only one. There were many others at the time, because making games was a fun way to explore possibilities. “There were Dazzle Dart, a four-player laser tennis game, and Lunar Lander,” Vermeulen says. “Maze War was the first networked video game. People connected two IMLAC minicomputer/graphics terminals to the Arpanet via a PDP-10 mainframe, and used that million-dollar pile of hardware to chase each other through a maze or shoot each other.” And the original text adventures like Colossal Cave and Zork, as well as the first multiplayer online games like MUDs and Star Trek, were also written on PDP computers.
These machines are an essential part of our digital culture, the furnace of the modern gaming and tech industries. But to be understood, Already used
“The problem with computer history is that putting old computers in a museum that aren’t being used communicates very little,” says Vermeulen. “You need to experience these machines and how they worked. And the problem with computers before about 1975 is that they were huge, heavy and nearly impossible to keep running. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen loved his PDP-10 deeply, and with the funds he had, he was able to hire a team of skilled technicians to repair and get it running. But it was very expensive, and sadly, his family decided to discontinue this after he passed away.”
The answer is emulation. The PDP replica has all the look of the original terminal, including the lights and switches, but the calculations are done by a Raspberry Pi microcomputer connected to the back via a serial port. To get it running at home, just plug in the Raspberry Pi, connect a keyboard and monitor, boot it up and download the software. Then flip the switch on the front of the PDP-10, reboot the Raspberry Pi, and you’ll be in PDP mode, with a window on your monitor emulating the old Knight TV terminal display. A command line interface (remember those?) gives you access to a range of the original programs, including games.
This is what I’ve been waiting for. We all know the important role SpaceWar played in the birth of the modern games industry, but actually playing it and controlling a spaceship battling amongst vector explosions against a flickering starry sky…it feels like you’re living history.
In the 15 years since Vermeulen began developing his personal PDP-8 emulator, the Obsolescence Guaranteed group has sold hundreds of replicas and continues to develop more, including a replica of MIT’s experimental Project Whirlwind computer from the 1950s (which ran a simple version of tic-tac-toe). Today, a company in Panama called Chiriqui Electronic Design Studio manufactures the hardware. What started as a personal project has become something much bigger. “We had an ‘official’ launch of our PiDP-10 replica at MIT in Boston, where the original machine was kept. The demo session was attended by about 50 hackers from the 1970s. It was fun to see people playing the multi-user Maze War game 50 years later.”
Another reason the PiDP-10 is worth it is because it’s fun. I never imagined seeing something like this up close, much less plugging it into a monitor at home and playing with it. It was an exciting, nostalgic, and weirdly emotional experience. Navigating the ITS disk system, the glowing green dot-matrix font, the appealing list of programs and games, the “happy hacking!” message above the terminal command line – it’s very evocative.
Impressive…PiDP-10 screen. Photo: Keith Stewart/The Guardian
Meanwhile, programmers who bought PiDP machines are creating new programs and games. They range in age from 80-year-old PDP veterans to 20-year-olds who want to relive a bygone era of programming. Memory and processing power were scarce, so elegant and super-efficient code had to be written; there was no room for bloat. “Quite a few universities are using the PiDP-11 and -8 in their classes,” Vermeulen says. “Partly to show computer science students our origins, but also because the super-low-level programming still required for microcontrollers and hardware drivers is the type of coding you learn very well on these dinosaurs.”
Brinkhoff agrees that while these machines have a certain nostalgia, they also have something to teach us: They’re functional. “I enjoy writing new software for the 10, like a program to display fractals or generate QR codes,” he says.
“I hope it becomes more widely accepted, because if you don’t do anything with PiDP, it just sits on a shelf and the lights flash. It looks pretty, but I don’t think the computer can be truly happy unless you program it.”
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