Cold hard storage capacity like that is great, but what if that kind of power could be integrated with something more alive -- something like a single cell, or for that matter, integrated into every cell.
Researchers at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center have just succeeded writing multiple analog streams of real-time environmental data into the genetically transformed hardware of a distributed population of bacterial cells. Living, breathing computers like this are a tremendous advance over the simple encoding of arbitrary digital data with DNA microchips.