Innovation of the week: Preserve your data — for billions of years

"Photos fade, books rot, and even hard drives fester," but a new way to store data could preserve human knowledge for billions of years, said James Vincent in The Verge​. Scientists at the University of Southampton in England have turned to the special properties of glass to preserve data virtually for eternity — encoding music, images, and video files using "nanostructures" inside tiny glass discs.

Glass is heat-resistant and chemically stable, giving the discs an estimated life span of up to 13.8 billion years, "more than three times the age of the Earth." A complex method called five-dimensional storage allows each glass disc to carry 3,000 times as much data as a regular Blu-ray disc. Researchers have already made copies of the King James Bible, Isaac Newton's Opticks, and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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