经济学人下载:数据存储(1)

A hard drive is a miracle of modern technology.
硬盘驱动器是现代技术的一个奇迹。

For $50 anyone can buy a machine that can comfortably store the contents of,
只要花上50美元，每个人都能买上一台机器，轻松地将牛津大学

say, the Bodleian Library in Oxford as a series of tiny magnetic ripples on a spinning disk of cobalt alloy.
博德利图书馆中的书籍内容储存为钴合金旋转圆盘上的一系列微小磁波纹。

But, as is often the case, natural selection knocks humanity's best efforts into a cocked hat.
但通常自然选择把人类最大的努力打得一败涂地。

DNA, the information-storage technology preferred by biology, can cram up to 215 petabytes of data into a single gram.
DNA是生物学偏爱的一种信息存储技术，它可以将215拍字节的数据塞进一克的物质中。

That is 10m times what the best modern hard drives can manage.
这一储存量是现代最好硬盘驱动器可存储量的一千万倍。

And DNA storage is robust. While hard-drive warranties rarely exceed five years,
而且DNA存储也很稳定。虽然硬盘的保修期一般不会超过五年，

DNA is routinely recovered from bones that are thousands of years old
DNA通常是从数千年前的骨头中提取出来的

(the record stands at 700,000 years, for a genome belonging to an ancestor of the modern horse).
（最久远的记录来自于70万年前，基因组属于现代马的祖先）。

For those reasons, technologists have long wondered whether DNA could be harnessed to store data commercially.
出于那些原因，技术人员一直想知道是否可以利用DNA来进行商业数据存储。

Archival storage is one idea, for it minimises DNA's disadvantages—which are that, compared with hard drives, reading and writing it is fiddly and slow.
想法之一是档案储存，因为它可以尽量减少DNA的劣势—与硬盘驱动相比，读取和写入DNA既繁琐又缓慢。

Now, though, a team led by Yaniv Erlich of Erlich Lab, an Israeli company,
现在由以色列公司Erlich Lab的Yaniv Erlich以及

and Robert Grass, a chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have had another idea.
苏黎世联邦理工学院化学家Robert Grass领导的团队已经有了另一种想法。

As they describe in a paper in Nature Biotechnology, they want to use DNA data storage to give all manner of ordinary objects a memory of their own.
他们在发表于《Nature Biotechnology》的一篇论文中称，他们想要利用DNA数据存储来给各种各样的普通物体一份属于他们自己的记忆。

The researchers describe a test run in which they encoded the Stanford bunny—a standard test image in computer graphics—into chunks of DNA.
研究人员描述了他们将斯坦福兔子（计算机图形中的标准测试图像）编码成DNA块的一次测试运行。

Those chunks were then given a protective sheath of silica nanoparticles. That served to protect them for the next stage,
然后给这些块体涂上一层二氧化硅纳米颗粒的保护层。这可以为它们进入下个阶段提供保护，

in which they were mixed with plastic and used as feedstock in a 3D printer, which printed a model of the bunny.
在这一阶段，它们与塑料混合，并被用作3D打印机的原料，该3D打印机打印出了这个兔子的模型。