The above is a flapping robot ray powered by genetically engineered rat heart cells.
It is entirely artificial.
Story here.
The kind of bacteria one uses is important going forward. For this particular experiment researchers used E. coli that clocks in a fairly respectable storage of 100 bytes. However, certain bacteria, such as Sulfolobus tokodaii may be capable of storing thousands of bytes.Other scientists claim that they can store the equivalent of 700 terabytes of data into a gram of DNA.
You can't carry this around on a key chain. I'd be afraid to poop; all it wants is to sit in your small intestine with your entire DVD library stored in its nucleus.
Story here.
I can't help but think that maybe all this research is not a good idea. Or maybe some people have too much idle time on their hands.
These guys have that problem but they're more like, "Hold my beer and watch me do this."
