Future Memory...in your DNA??? How can this affect my wallet?

Researcher Nick Goldman of the Eurpoean Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and his group have expanded the ability of DNA to store information long-term from its previous capacity of 700 terabits per gram (still a lot of information) to 2.2 petabits per gram, which is a threefold increase in storage tech. Comapred to more traditional methods of storage available today, this would equal "Half a Million DVDs Stored in a Gram of DNA" to quote the title of a Wired magazine article.

(Photo credit: Ars Techinica and Goldman, et al. Nature. published online here) 
Ars Technica also reports on this finding published in Nature the other day, on the 23rd of Jan 2013. The figure above gives a brief summary on how the authors were able to encode data like textbook pdf's, Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech in mp3, and picture jpegs.

Note though that this kind of information storage would be inefficient to use for data storage like we use in our computers- read/write material would be too tough for DNA to be able to handle. This kind of memory storage would be best suited for use in data archiving, storage of data that won't ever change but may need to be accessed for a long amount of time.

Science Friday's Ira Glass has released a podcast about this phenomenon, so click through the link to check out the audio podcast. The original articles are below, so go take a look to check out the layman's summary of this cool new tech!
In a related note, Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke before congress the other day talking about the importance of funding for fundamental science research and how results that are interesting today still take a while to reach the consumer- but the investment long term is still worth it!

From the article:
"Tyson cited Michael Faraday discovering the basic principles behind generating electricity in the 1830s (with a quote that is apocryphal at best), then noted "We didn't electrify cities until the turn of the century." Quantum physics was born in the 1920s, and it took another 50 years for those principles to see widespread commercial applications in computing: "A third of the world economy is based on quantum physics, because information technology requires quantum physics!""

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/dna-data-storage-2/
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/mp3-files-written-as-dna-with-storage-density-of-2-2-petabytes-per-gram/
http://sciencefriday.com/segment/01/25/2013/shakespeare-s-sonnets-encoded-in-dna.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11875.html
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-takes-his-case-for-science-funding-to-dc/