Microsoft stored an OK Go music video in strings of DNA

Hundreds of years from now, today’s DVDs, web servers, and flash drives will all be long dead. But one copy of a music video — for alternative rock band OK Go’s song "This Too Shall Pass" — could still be playing. The Rube Goldberg-inspired video is part of a 202-megabyte cache of data that Microsoft and the University of Washington say they’ve written to DNA storage — the largest known DNA storage trove created to date.

Project Palix is a research partnership between Microsoft and researchers at the University of Washington’s computer science and engineering department, with help from startup Twist Bioscience. Its goal is to advance the technology that could one day make synthetic strands of DNA a viable alternative to conventional...