Researchers out of the European Bioinformatics Institute are claiming to have successfully encoded 154 Shakespeare sonnets, as well as an MP3 of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and crammed it all into a single DNA strand. This information costs of around 739KB of data.

Better yet, researchers were able to read those files again with 100% accuracy leading to the possibilities of eventually storing data within the strands of our DNA. With DNA being just chemical-based instruction manuals for developing highly complex organisms with a seemingly never ending variety of permutations. A researcher involved with the testing said:

We realized that DNA itself is a really efficient way of storing information. Over a second beer, we started to write on napkins and sketch out some details of how that might be made to work.

A single gram of DNA can is capable of storing an incredible 2.2 petabytes of information, with the paper claiming "We recovered 757,051 bytes of information from 337 pg of DNA (above), giving an information storage density of ~2.2 PB/g (= 757,051/337 x 10-12)".