Hey Fans of Tampering With the Fabric of Life — You Can Now Store Data on Salmon Sperm!

So, guess what? Turns out in the future you may be filling your pockets and computer with salmon sperm. Yup. Allow me to elaborate…

Taiwanese scientists have come up with a new data storage device by combining salmon sperm DNA, silver and lasers. Put very basically, they added some silver to a thin film of salmon sperm, then shone a UV light on it. The UV light caused the silver molecules to bunch into nanoparticles. Zap some of these nanoparticles with a laser and they’ll become electrically charged. You can then go back and read the data with charged particles equalling a “1” in binary computer speak, and non-charged particles equalling a “0”.

Get all that? Yeah, neither did I entirely, but that’s okay — the real point here is that this salmon sperm-based memory would be a lot cheaper to produce than the high-quality silicon based memory we use now.

I dunno, I like a bargain and all, but SD cards are already pretty ridiculously cheap — I think maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to resist buying the ones made out of fish jizz.

via Gizmondo

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