SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A few hundred feet inside a permafrost-encrusted mountain below the Arctic circle sits the seed bank that could be humanity's last hope during a global food crisis. This month, scientists suggested that this unassuming vault is the ideal space for preserving the world's data on DNA.
This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a bunker on the Arctic island of Svalbard, which for the past seven years has amassed almost a half million seed samples from all over the world. The idea is to use the naturally freezing, isolated environment of the far north to preserve the world's plant life and agricultural diversity—which, of course, is under threat by climate change and disaster. If a food crisis occurs, the vault could provide the seeds that repopulate parts of the world.
But it could potentially preserve much more than seeds. A study in the German chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie this month details the quest to find out how long data stored on DNA could be preserved, and also suggests the vault as the ideal storage location.
http://gizmodo.com/the-isolated-vault-that-could-store-our-data-on-dna-for-1687457772
[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @05:11PM
"this is awesome!
especially for someone like me that adores nuclear steam creation and doesn't much give a damn about the environment!
now we can build (and nuke power) a 3-D human printer in a cave that will create a humans [sic] in 2 million years after all the crap has decayed and killed everybody on the planet if nobody shows up to reset the switch for another 2 million years"