How the Library of Congress packed 250 years of U.S. history into a vial the size of a quarter

To save on space, the Library of Congress is packing what would otherwise be pages and pages worth of documents and other media from U.S. history into a single vial for the nation’s time capsule marking 250 years since the founding. The method that makes it possible is synthetic DNA. The storage technique uses artificial DNA molecules like a hard drive by converting data sequenced in 0s and 1s, the binary language of computers, into As (adenine), Cs (cytosine), Gs (guanine), a...