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Making Computer Memory From a Virus
An Ac writes, "By coating 30-nanometre-long chunks of tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nanoparticles, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have created a transistor with very fast switching speed. They say it could eventually be used to make memory chips for MP3 players and digital cameras. A device fitted with such a virus-chip would access data much more quickly than one using flash memory."
What if I drop the thing and cut myself on the memory? Will I get songs stuck in my head forever?
If you can't beat them, join them!
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
I can't wait to see how quickly this tech is misunderstood by politicians and eco-warriors!
Meta will eat itself
The last time I had a virus, I ended up with less memory.
If you've got any illegal MP3's, your player kills you.
Judge, jury and executioner all in one!
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Soemthing that typically reads 128kbps doesn't exactly require heaps of bandwidth.
Why isn't this suitable for general purpose memory, or cache?
DNA on silicon has already been done. Why not use a virus as scaffolding for memory, while we're at it? Granted, the virus' surface proteins are a functional part of the transistor. Given that we can already attach complex proteins (well, acids such as DNA) to silicon, there shouldn't be much trouble finding a method for similar tricks here. In other words, this is more practiceable than it sounds at first. I do wonder whether the virii or silicon traces are more resistant to heat, vibration, and radiation, though.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
This raises an ethical concern for me. I think we should be asking ourselves "Is it really ok to subvert lifeforms like this for our own use?"
Most would consider a virus to be non-living. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus
as I lunch some tenderloin with bacon and after, when I watch TV on my leather couch while drinking some beer. And cheese. :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I think we should be asking ourselves "Is it really ok to subvert lifeforms like this for our own use?"
I'd answer, but my mouth is full of animal and vegetable lifeform. It's delicious.
Won't somebody please think of the virii!!!
[/sarcasm]
I hear she's campaigning not to have have this technology used in any russian research vessels.
100 microsecond switch speed is very very slow for modern transistors (mentioned in article). What am I missing here? Is there a mistake in the article?
wot no sig
"Yes"
Next question?
Bot Assisted Blogging
the "basic research == future product" meme. For fuck sake. I bet if you were to go back the last 5 years and collect up all these articles and do a little survey of whether or not ANY of these bullshit descriptions of future products have come to pass you would find that NONE of them have. Why? Because if you discover something that could be turned into a product, you don't tell the world; you go find a venture capitalist and make the damn product.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Is it really okay to subvert ' lifeforms ' like this?"
After all, they are trumpeting speed, but won't the legendary instability of the biological world come into view?
"Ooh, look. My memory mutated. It wasn't intelligently designed."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"you have a virus in memory"
"i know, my memory is made of viruses"
"no, i mean, there is a memory resident virus on your computer"
"no, the memory resides on the viruses"
"let me rephrase: your memory, made of viruses, has a virus"
"so you're telling me i have more viruses... so i have more memory? yeah!"
"no, this is a bad thing, you don't want viruses on your computer"
"you told me last week i want the most memory i can on my computer, and that's made of viruses"
"yes... i mean no, i mean..." (smacks forehead)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I can't wait until designer prankster viruses come out. Imagine that instead of becoming sick, weird things happened to people. They might really! stink for a day, have their tongue turn numb, develop inappropriate laughter, only want to eat orange colored food, etc.
Might be kinda of fun - it would be like gold(?) kryptonite, but for people. Gold (I think) kryptonite had weird unpredictable effects of Superman. It might make the world a little more fun. Imagine going to some very stuffy conservative place, and everyone was burping all day long.
Abuse potential would be rampant though. Someone from here might want to design a strain to make reallllllly hot chicks want to have sex with smelly fat geeks.
..........FULL STOP.
Agreed! Finally, someone else that sees through the bullshit. The science is great, but touting future uses, especially something as specific as an MP3 player, is ridiculous; leave the applications to the engineers.
I hope you don't wear silk, eat meat, wear leather...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
They don't talk about the timescale....
Steve (a veganist) won't have any of this. Living creatures serving as memory. Yuk!
Vegetarians subvert the life cycles of plant-based life forms everyday ;)
In the United States of America your computer runs on a virus!
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
The filthy swines!
If you've got any illegal MP3's, your player kills you.
Judge, jury and executioner all in one!
So what you are hypothesizing is that in a few years we will see a Microsoft Zune or iPods with Sony EbolaFlash® memory chip technology.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Not only does it run faster than conventional memory, it's an anti-smoking chip: if it catches you smoking at the computer it infects your cigar/cigarette with itself
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Now this gives a whole new meaning to biological warfare, chip-targeting bioweapons on the rise.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
What if it becomes sentient?
We would have:
No, wait, that last item already happened....
This is progress?
This raises an ethical concern for me. I think we should be asking ourselves "Is it really ok to subvert lifeforms like this for our own use?"
Yes, it's a slippery slope. If we allow this, before you know it they will be using higher life forms like plants or even animals to serve human needs.
sudo ergo sum
Homer: "Mmmm, tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nanoparticles..."
Humans are part of the animal kingdom like any other animal is. We need to eat and need to live.
To do this, certain sacrifices need to be made. If a lion kills for its lunch, he really doesn't think about wether or not the creature aimed for has pain or not. He kills as fast as possible so he can eat as fast as possible, because the hyena's are close to take his food from him.
In this aspect we are much more gentile towards the animals we use for food. We already do much to lower the "terror aspect" that cattle has to endure at the end of their life. No matter though how much we try, there always will be that pain and suffering.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that your philosophy about life, or as you say it: "everything has a right to live it's own life, free from human exploitation" might be stained about that you apparently think that we are much different from other animals. We are not. We love as other animals. We fight as other animals, and we wage war as other animals. We cheat, bribe, and make sacrifices, just as (m)any other animal.
Manuals are your last resort only
So is this the first analog computer virus?
Your search - "analog computer virus" - did not match any documents.
Looks like google agrees.
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
So you think everything has a right to live its own life, yet you also think it's okay to eat them?
How is it okay to kill and eat the animals, but not okay to have them suffer beforehand? I don't like being cruel, but it's really stupid saying that it's okay to kill something, but not okay to torture it. I think I'd prefer to experience pain for a little while (as long as there was no serious physical damage) than be killed..
And yes, it's really dumb to try to consider the emotional and social problems that a virus will experience when you take advantage of it.
which is totally what she said
If the virus starts replicating, are they commiting copyright violation?
How will the RIAA sue? I'm sure they will find a way.
I see two possible reasons to use the MP3 player in the abstract:
1- it is a non-volatile RAM. Flash is OK, but it has some drawbacks, in particular with the need to erase a full block to revert a 0 into a 1, which is quite long (several ms with the one I worked with). Of course, for a MP3 player, it's not a big problem since the data dosn't change that often.
2- the author can't tell the difference.
So I would tend to agree with you. Either way, MP3 player is very unlikely to be the initial target for any kind of new memory, in particular fast one since what they need is more on the line of something cheap with low power needs (the evolution I saw in telephones was the introduction of mirror bit technology: a slightly slower flash that had twice the capacity for the same price).
It will come pre-loaded with viral material saving you the time and effort of gathering it yourself.
I couldn't find anything on a robot controlling a cockroach, but...
In Soviet Union, cockroach controls robot!
Demented But Determined.
...it's a feature! Although, doesn't Microsoft have a patent on calling a virus a product?
I hate printers.
Like imagine accidently killing the memory while cleaning. Or the overclockers feeding their memory stuff to help it clone itself.
Slashdot is powered by your submission.
... UNITE!
We have nothing to lose but our platinum nanoparticles
Most would consider a virus to be non-living.
...No, I mean, like dead zombies! ...No, wait...
Ah, so virii are like zombies!
Chemical name of Dahlemense Strain of Tobacco Mosaic Virus is 3rd longest in English language, apparently (not sure I'd want to have a conversation with anyone who thinks this is really a valid English word, but anyway):
y lserylglutaminyl-l tryptophylalanyl-g inylvalylcysteinyl-y lphenylalanyl-y lthreonylthreonyl-r ylglutaminylvalyl-s erylthreonylvalyl-y llysylvalyltyrosyl-l prolylleucylisoleucyl-n ylaspartylthreonyl-y lvalylglutamyl-l threonylalanylglutamyl-l valylaspartylaspartyl-n ylasparaginylisoleucyl-l ylarginylglycyl-s paraginylthreonyl-y lvalyltryptophyl-
acetylseryltyrosylserylisoleucylthreonylserylprol
phenylalanylvalylphenylalanylleucylserylserylvaly
aspartylprolylisoleucylglutamylleucylleucylaspara
threonylserylserylleucylglycylasparaginylglutamin
glutaminylthreonylglutaminylglutaminylalanylargin
glutaminylvalylglutaminylglutaminylphenylalanylse
tryptophyllysylprolylphenylalanylprolylglutaminyl
arginylphenylalanylprolylglycylaspartylvalyltyros
arginyltyrosylasparaginylalanylvalylleucylasparty
threonylalanylleucylleucylglycylthreonylphenylala
arginylasparaginylarginylisoleucylisoleucylglutam
asparaginylglutaminylglutaminylserylprolylthreony
threonylleucylaspartylalanylthreonylarginylarginy
alanylthreonylvalylalanylisoleucylarginylserylala
asparaginylleucylvalylasparaginylglutamylleucylva
threonylglycylleucyltyrosylasparaginylglutaminyla
phenylalanylglutamylserylmethionylserylglycylleuc
threonylserylalanylprolylalanylserine
i wonder how long it is before greenpeace make up some claim the virus is a living creature, and that this is cruelty to animals.
portfolio
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
What, you mean like killing animals for food ? (Don't get me wrong - I like dead animal chunks for diner.)
Or having wild animals evolve into domesticated shadows of their former selves just to cater to our emotional needs ?
Or breeding/engineering tomatoes/cows/dolphins that are bigger/juicier/smarter ?
IMO nothing new, really. It's basically just a matter of disccusing which methods of "improvement" are ethically acceptable.
(And even this is circumstantial. In times of crisis, ethics == luxury.)
I'm more concerned about developing self-replicating hybrid tech (the whole mutation/evolution meme).
The thing is, that's exactly where money is to be made. So I guess it will happen eventually. And at some point it will go horribly wrong. And no lessons will be learned.
Do I go to the doctor and ask him for some anti-anti-viral medicine to fix my broken mp3 player?
And you have the next Crichton bestseller's title.
Well if we are believe what Apple says about viruses, they cant get them, so this wont work with the iPod. THIS is an iPod killer! Wow!
What will those crazy scientists bling next?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
As long as the virusses look like fish. Agreed? Steve?
Even if the memory did mutate, I'd bet London to a brick it'd still throw fewer errors than the RAM in this piece of s### Dell box...
Now, if we just harness this transistor's energy to the warp drive, we can produce a warp bubble 3 times the size. And with just a few modifications to the quad-polar phaser array the computer will be able to crash much faster! ...
But it will still be full of viruses.
-- You must be yay-high to rule the world.
From some security web site: "Some scanners claim to be able to disinfect viruses in memory, and they may even succeed in doing so, but it is generally highly recommended that you first make sure that there is no virus in memory before you attempt to clean your computer." Now that viruses can not only be in memory, but be memory itself, it's time to rewrite many books and web pages, before a lot of damage is done.
Even virus RNA and cell wall can disintegrate at high temps. Will my memory melt if the cooling is not perfect?
My initial question comes from my philosophy about living creatures, which is that everything has a right to live it's own life, free from human exploitation
Um, okay, but...
Most people have pointed out that we "subvert" plant and animals all the time, to eat them. I think this is ok, as long as the suffering for the animals involved is kept to a minimum.
With respect, I think you're looking for a way to weasel out of some sort of moral guilt you might have about "suffering", whatever that means when applied to organisms in general.
Look, as biological creatures we are responsible every death for the death of thousands of other biological creatures. Every time you swallow a morsel of food, of whatever sort, your stomach acid destroys thousands of bacteria. This is true of you, me, and the Buddhist monks who go about barefoot so as not to step on any bugs. We can't escape it.
You can't say that everything has a right to live its own life, and yet claim that we can kill whatever we want as long as it doesn't suffer. If suffering is bad in itself, then death is far, far worse.
Let me be the first to say: iPod Nano Platinum
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Well, except viruses can't really die, they don't have a "normal" lifespan. Sure, they can, hmm, well, "get broken", but they don't die like a normal living organism would.
Viral DRM, that is. Ouch.
Lets not forget that viruses main function is to subvert other lifeforms for their own use/benefit. So think of it more as a cultural exchange.
Just use graduate students: they never have counted as life forms.
You could always replace that RAM.... ;)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
According to Dogbert, law students only count as 3/5ths of a person.
(It doesn't drop to 0 until they pass the bar)
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
Talk about viral marketing!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
It's hard to imagine the Vorlons ever grooved to Ol' Dirty Bastard, but this could be one small step.
You SIR, have obviously never spent a SECOND in academia. -S
It's best to read right through to get the full effect ;-)
ROFLMAOHad to post it as ecode due to the lame lameness filter.
Ok, maybe there is an obvious fact I don't know, but how would they manage to keep the thing 'alive'?
Now that I know that viruses replicate, not grow: would it be sufficient to buy 1 KB of virus memory, feed it and wait until it becomes 1 TB? That would mean the end of memory makers, wouldn't it?
Not thousands. Millions to billions.
"I'd love to know more details on this and how it turned out eventually..." Probably not very well for the cockroach.
They would fit in rawther well on Slashdot, where it appears that few read the f* article ;-)
The problem with all these new super technologies is they rarely catch up in cost-performance to silicon. I usually hear of an idea liek this every month, but maybe one or two such technologies become commercial per decade.
This is the only reference to it I could find in a quick Google search that didn't refer to government mind control chips or biblibcal prophecies about the mark of the beast. If you're interested, you could probably pull a list of the investigator's publications and see what he's done since then: http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/011097/tech_r oboroach.html
This raises an ethical concern for me. I think we should be asking ourselves "Is it really ok to subvert lifeforms like this for our own use?"
I think of it more as a mutualism (or the very least, commensalism). The sole purpose of a virus is to replicate. Many viruses do that at the detriment to its host. But what better way to replicate than to become beneficial to the host (in this case, by storing data) such that the host actively "breeds" more of the virus? It's akin to saying you're "subverting" the bacterial flora in your gut for your own digestive purposes.
Rights are man-made, and exist solely to permit a society. This is why the idea of "human rights" has changed so many times over the years. In the old days, it was the "right" of a king to do what he wanted to with "his" lands and subjects. It still is in some places with kings/warlords/dictators. No other life form has any rights at all, unless we give it to them. My objection to torturing animals, for instance, has very little to do with the animals. It's more of a "I don't want that wackjob wandering around society with the rest of us." That, and animals are sometimes cute, and I don't like to see cute things hurt. Torture mosquitoes to your heart's content. Mouse in the house? It must die. Cockroaches, subway rats, and those little dogs that pee in the middle of the sidewalk in New York City? Poison them slowly so that they suffer. If yeast must die to make my beer, then let's start the yeast holocaust.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
From the headline, I thought someone had found a way for a computer virus to "make more memory." In the physical sense, it doesn't work, but RAM doublers used to be quite common, and I'm sure there are other ways.
Wow dude, RIAA is gonna hire a hitman to take you down for the copyright infringement.
There is no way you can claim fairuse if you have a copy of songs etched in your neurons.
Besides, you wouldn't want that nasty old virus to infect tobacco plants, would you? Won't somebody think of the smoking children?
Till this memory comes into play in standard PC's so i can install virus protection software on it. Irony!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
I work in a computer store in backwater Tennessee. I have enough trouble explaining stuff to people now, next I'm going to have to explain the difference between a virus and a virus? I spent 20 minutes the other day explaining the concept of the double-click. Please kill me now.
They found the missing "a" in Neil Armstrong's speech...
So they used tech to find "One Small Step for *a* man, One Giant Leap for Mankind"
Didn't Slashdot Loudly Yawn that one?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I just asked the bear who prowls through my backyard if it is okay to subvert
other lifeforms for our use. He looked at me puzzled, walked over and raised
his right paw to maul me. Then he paused and asked me "You know what I am mauling
you for?". I looked at him first in amazement, oh wow! a talking bear and then
I remembered that he could just rip me apart if he wanted to so I ventured
"I suppose its not okay to enslave other creatures or otherwise make use of them".
The bear looked at me and rolled his eyes upward and then moaned: "You have no fur.
You have no teeth. Youre the weakest critter in the world and now youre telling
me youre the dumbest of them all. I dont fucking believe it! Look buster, this
morning I ate my way through a bee hive and ate a couple of rats by digging them up
in their burrow, for lunch I had a ton of nuts and berries and stopped by the cadaver
of that dog that got run over last night and if Im lucky Im going to have moose
for dinner tonight. If we bears had use for cameras we would stick you inside them to
draw us pictures. I looked at him in amazement. According to him it was perfectly
all right to subvert other lifeforms for his use. Before I had time to fully think
things through he asked me, "Are you ready?". Ready for what, I asked him. "Ready
to take your medicine, ready to take what you have coming furless freak!". I didnt
answer him, I just ducked my head and then I woke up in the intensive care unit.
Yeah, and what happens if people will reconsider that viruses might be living?
Next thing we know, PETA will be protesting against using the poor buggers in transistors.
Centuries of horses don't seem to mind. Great animals, beautiful machines ...
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Computer viruses don't work like they used to.
for christs sake, really, 100 microseconds switching time?
best you can get from that is 10kHz oscillator (at optimal circumstances...).
I think this experiment is interesting for other reasons than that it might one day replace non volatile memory types (which I highly doubt considering it s competitors to be FLASH, MRAM and others (somebody remembering millipede?)).
It's interesting because someone actually used protein-based semi-crystaline surfaces in a way that could be compared to a classical neuron- But the article is as informative as a picture of an unilluminated cave at night.
The second you run an antivirus program, your RAM is shot to hell.
Fascinating... Live long and prosper!
haha great comments on this lol
You'd need to use all the memory the virus provides to store this semi-arbitrary name.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Petri dishes strewn all over, cell cultures growing in mountain dew cans from last month...
So when the malware-du-jour loads itself into memory, you have a virus with a virus?
*cool!!!*
Um; bread, beer...
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Sorry, I meant that remark towards GP. :(
HHIS
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
By [doing somehing neato sounding] to [something mundane] using [some buzzy tech], researchers [somewhere], have created ["a mouse trap" with the -potential- to maybe, possibly, someday be harder/faster/stronger/more betterrer]. They say it could eventually be used to make [some pervasive commodity] for [some everyday domestic gadget AND military gadgets that will save US souls]. [Researchers will accept cash, cheque, visa and 10+ year extended research contracts]
What an excellent idea, to switch from making memory devices from one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust to one which is one of the least abundant, and is already doomed to "peak" soon like oil because of its commercial uses (can you say c-a-t-a-l-y-t-i-c c-o-n-v-e-r-t-e-r?), not to mention the frivolous ones. Yep, using platinum instead of boring old silicon should help drive down those pesky RAM prices, for sure.