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dmoberhaus writes: A 26-year-old Belgian PhD student named Sander Wuytz recently solved a 3-year-old puzzle that had locked the private key to 1 Bitcoin in a strand of synthetic DNA. Motherboard spoke with the student about how they managed to crack the puzzle, just days before it was set to expire. From the report: "As detailed by Nick Goldman, a researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute, in his pioneering Nature paper on DNA storage, to encode information into DNA you take a text or binary file and rewrite it in base-3 (so rather than just ones and zeroes, there are zeroes, ones, and twos). This is then used to encode the data in the building blocks of life, the four nucleobases cytosine, thymine, adenine and guanine. As Wuyts explained to me, coding the data as nucleobases depended upon which nucleobase came before. So, for instance, if the previous base was adenine and the next pieces of data is a 0, it is coded as cytosine. If the next piece of data is a 1, it's coded as guanine, and so on. After the data is encoded as synthetic DNA fragments, these fragments are used to identify and read the actual files stored in the DNA. In the case of the Bitcoin challenge, there were a total of nine files contained in the DNA fragments. The files were encrypted with a keystream, which is a random series of characters that is included with the actual plain text message to obfuscate its meaning. The keystream code had been provided by Goldman in a document explaining the competition.

After running the code, Wuyts was able to combine the DNA fragments in the correct order to form one long piece of DNA. After working out some technical kinks, Wuyts was able to convert the DNA sequence into plain text, revealing the private key and unlocking the bitcoin (as well as some artefacts, including a drawing of James Joyce and the logo for the European Bioinformatics Institute). He had cracked the puzzle just five days before it was set to expire."

eldavojohn writes "Three pilot projects have been completed for the 1000 Genomes Project and as a result, the pilot data has been released. This makes the data of nearly 700 people available for analysis via FTP (Americas mirror, European mirror). Dr. Eric D. Green of the National Human Genome Research Institute said, 'The 1000 Genomes project has a simple goal: peer more deeply into the genetic variations of the human genome to understand the genetic contribution to common human diseases. I am excited about the progress being made on this resource for use by scientists around the world and look forward to seeing what we learn from the next stage of the project.' There's not a whole lot of information on their site about this data, but the repositories have many readme files explaining the data layout."

Couple of Perl Bits fell into the bin worth noting today: dlc writes, "The results of the Perl Poetry Content are in, and are available." If you're into this sort of thing, you'll dig it. A lot of clever stuff there. Course the sonnet generator is probably my favorite... hack it to generate rock lyrics, and I can start a band and record a debut album. ;) If that's not weird enough for you, check out the PerlOS Project. A PerlWM, a PerlSH, and more. It will strike fear into even the most hardened of Perl Monks.