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Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria
Bananana writes "A research team out of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found a way to do data encryption and storage with bacteria. The project is called 'Bioencryption,' and their presentation (as a PDF file) is here."
If that bacteria mutates and starts spreading through human hosts, EVERYONE will have your data!
in what bateria is.
The next time i wipe my hard drive, I could do it with bleach?
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
How fast is the data access? Can I use them for RAID 10 in my new storage?
Bateria?
Was the research funded by Bruce Wayne
Gives new(old?) meaning to the term virus. ;)
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.
My anti-virus software just deleted all my data!
My Windows computer has been infected! Go buy another 2TB hard drive, I'm running out of space at an exponential rate!
In Soviet Russia, bacteria infects your data!
The Bacteria Protection Agency is up in arms!
Hello nerds. Look at your keyboard, now back to me, now back at your keyboard, now back to me. Sadly, it's infected with bacteria, but if you stopped washing your hands, it could be a lot worst. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re still at your desk reading this shit. What’s on your hand, back at me. I have it, the solution to your storage problems. Look again, the bacteria are now data. Anything is possible when you stop bathing. I’m a trojan horse.
etc.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term "contagious meme" :).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
We need to find a long-term backup medium, as long as I keep a cold slice of pizza on my hard drive, those bacteria will keep munching away and saving my data.
For data density, that's not too shabby. 1TB of data fits into approximately 12 grams of storage.
Of course, it depends on the size/weight of the read/write equipment, but could this be comparable to mechanical disks for data density?
Just have to remember to feed and water your computer every so often...and wonder if the data cops would be able to use torture to force-retrieve your data? Poor little bugs...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I see no posts tagged other than funny in this story's future...
cant be long now.
Now let's see the TSA mess with my pr0n (sorry, business data) at the airport!
And I can quite happily keep it warm under my balls. "Sorry, officer, it's man juice, really".
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
"The term bateria means “drum kit” in Portuguese and Spanish." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateria
Does that mean we have to samba every time we access data?
Actually, that sounds kinda fun.
What they actually did was to store about 100 bytes. This may be useful for putting copyright information into genetically engineered organisms. As a method of bulk data storage, though, it leaves much to be desired.
DNA synthesis costs about $0.29 per base pair. Sequencing is a bit cheaper, but you currently get less than 1000 base pairs sequenced per run. Reading and writing takes a room of expensive wet lab gear, and hours to days.
I just couldn't help myself with this one.
In a related story, People for the Ethical Treatment of Germs are outraged. A spokesperson for the agency has offered an official statement requesting minimum hourly wages, paid vacation time off, and retirement benefits. They fell that considering the working environment is quite literally a shit-hole these demands are entirely reasonable.
I had it stored on my brand-new crash-proof bio-Raid 5 array. But Smokey scored a big bag of weed last night, got the hungry and thought the bio-drives were blocks of ice cream I'd forgotten to put away. He tossed them in the freezer and ate 'em with chocolate sauce. I guess crash-proof, isn't munchy-proof.
On slide 35 / 47 it claims 900GB, not 90 / 1 gram.
I had no idea that my toilet could become my next data-warehouse.
By a maid and some Lysol.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I'd appreciate if a biologist /.er could shed some light to the following questions:
1. How many cells are there in 1 kg of bacteria?
2. How many cells are there in the human body?
3. By analogy, how many bytes can be stored in a human body?
4. How may bytes are stored in a human brain?
and optionally 5. How many cells and bytes are killed by an 1-hour dose of reading /. ?
So it is possible to store several petabytes of encrypted data in a human being if the person has had Chinese food at Kendall Square.
When you can carry around the sum total of humanity's creative works in a backpack that's easily copied, traditional notions of intellectual property become meaningless. No amount of legal penalty will change this. The drive to share the experience of new information is too strong.
Adapt or die.
..don't panic
I read TFA, and they're storing the data in the Bacteria's DNA. I assume there is a minimum chance of this happening, but if somehow the bacteria mutate and reproduce, perhaps with horizontal gene transfer, I don't know what could happen to existing species. What if suddenly one gene is changed and suddenly harmless bacteria become harmful?
Seriously, have they done a study on the safety of this method? Worst of all, we're not talking about a species which can easily be handled and captured if it ever escapes. We're talking about freaking bacteria.
Every time I sit on the crapper I must be producing terrabytes of back-up storage.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Actually it says 900,000GB. You were off by 10,000x. Better than the summary though.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
i posted.
Read radical news here
The project is called 'Bioencryption,' and their presentation (as a PDF file) is here.
As a PDF file, as opposed to as a bacterial culture, right?
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
...fixing the title with "Hong Kong Team Experiments with Wet Technology that Could Potentially Store up to 900TB of Data in 1g of E.Coli" as it says page 35 of their PDF.
They code 2 bits into each base pair of DNA, which is the maximum possible.
This means that some of the data will be instructions that the cell will execute.
I saw nothing of how to stop cells from executing the data.
when I am arrested and/or sued for copyright violations when I am sick with pirated bacteria..
Even the worst of the PDF viewers (Adobe) can be freely downloaded, but I haven't quite found a Bacteria Viewer for download yet...
Woah iGEM seems to be getting a lot of attention! This is good I think, synthetic biology is an important new field of engineering and science. In many ways I feel like the "old" AI days, the whole philosophy of "if you want to understand it, you'll have to build it" is very similar. Personally I was part of the University of Groningen team (www.igemgroningen.com) which aimed to create a hydrophobic (water repelling) biofilm coating, it could've had lots of applications if it worked but like most iGEM teams it wasn't all that successful. One of my primary objections to this project while watching the presentation is that you'll still have to sequence the genome ... a costly and time consuming activity, also the compression was a good thought but large sequences of nucleotides will inevitably start coding for RNA which could lead to a whole range of interference, unwanted proteins being the obvious one. Moreover you'll have entire colonies (millions of cells) with the same data, and little to no control between the individual differences.
While I do believe in the future of organic systems as a means for data processing and storage I don't believe that treating them as digital circuits is the right way to go.
Due to recent discoveries in data storage, encryption and data security issues will henceforth be handled by the CDC.
"program" the bacteria to generate rainbow tables, then as they reproduce, the size of the tables will expand, meaning you get more useful data over time. Eventually, you'll be able to get a 200 char password from its MD5, even if it's made of random characters and numbers, as well as upper and lower case letters!*
*Note: the above post has a deliberately narrow view as to how Bioencryption, rainbow tables, password cracking, science, etc. works
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Does "1g of bacteria" mean 1000 or 1024 milligrams?
What the Hell is a Bateria? It's not like Midichlorians, is it?
Anyone got a light for my sig?
Saw the ppt show. There's nothing there.
Just some very basic blather about encoding and redundancy.
Absolutely nothing new.
And AFAICT they have not done any actual DNA coding and decoding.
Perhaps they would have done everyone a service by actually estimating the time and cost of encoding/decoding 90GB.
Perhaps they left that part out as the numbers would be so dismal.
Explains the spelling error.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
In related news, the scientist was charged with DMCA violation as the bacteria duplicated data every time it divided into a new cell. RIAA was heard saying this is a blatant copy right violation. Test MP3s were all legally purchased.
Extraordinary claims need to have extraordinarily well working links.
One thing they didn't mention was the probability of the DNA mutating? That would change the message. These bacteria have to reproduce and copy the DNA...there should be some chance of a mutation.
The presentation says that 1g of E.Coli can contain 900 000gb, or 450 x 2tb hdd. That's slightly more than the 90gb in title.
Now we've got three meanings for GB:
1GB = 10^9
1GB = 2^30
1GB = 1 Gram Bacteria
When will the madness end!?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The capacity of the system is 900TB in 1 g of cells, not 90 GB. Read and write are bit slow...
Great...
Now it'll be possible to catch human viruses from the Internet :)
(Seriously -- what would stop an attacker from crafting a message that will code for a virus if this system ever found use?).
They translated ASCII into DNA coding strings and implanted those into the bacteria...I wonder have they tried to use the same decrytion method to decode current Bacteria DNA sequences into ASCII and see what they say....maybe the bacteria have been trying to talk to us all along???
Is it just me or is the method they describe as 'encryption' not actual encryption? What they describe in that section seems to refer more to the way they create the DNA strand in the form of [header][data][checksum]. Same with the decryption section, it refers to how they identify a full sequence for decoding. A common case of confusion between encoding and encryption? Or am I missing something?
Clearly your could encrypt the data (eg. with a block cipher/AES) in its binary form _before_ performing the binary->base pair conversion.
I've been storing all my porn in my sea monkey aquarium for years now!
The artikel states that 1g equals 900,000 GB, not 90 GB.
Now that the team has stored 90GB of data in 1g o bacteria, they're still working on how the hell to read the data back succesfully.
Am I missing something here?
What is the advantage of having to keep your data storage ALIVE as opposed to...well, just sitting there? This seems like a serious drawback to me.
And besides, terrorists will start using data storage devices to transport biological weaponry and all storage devices will have to be sequenced before travelers will be allowed into the boarding areas.
Wait a second, what thread was I in?
On slide 35 of the presentation is clearly states that 1 gram of E.coli can actually contain 900,000GB. It draws the comparison to 450 x 2TB Hard Disks.
Problem: Sneezing, and losing your entire collection of pornography.
Benefit: My offsite backup facility is now a brothel.
"There is no aspect of computing which does not, in some way, relate to sex."
I'm trying to figure out how they synthesized 1kb pieces of DNA without significant error rates. We're pushing the envelope after about 90 nucleotides with our in-house DNA synthesis machine.
..plenty of room for a Windows 7 install
:-]
This is what is known in the art world as a perfect marriage of subject and medium
Was that a typo? From the PDF I thought it was 1 gram = 900 TB (900,000 GB) not 90 GB
Hello, currently even at generous cost allowances this would cost 5-10 billion dollars to store 90gb of data this way. Not to mention the coat of getting it back out when you wanted to Would run in the several million dollar range. How much do you think it costs to synthesize a specific sequence of bps accuractly?
My hard drive ate it :-)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
That was what I was told around 1992 by someone who studied bacterial genetics. In just a couple of weeks, some new gene that showed up in bacteria in one place (say, a mutation producing a better way to process some compund in a patch of mud somewhere) could be found in bacteria on the other side of the planet. Which made me realize (in theory) then that coding information into bacteria could be like a low bandwidth internet, by just sequencing packets of data into bacteria that were released, and elsewhere devices would continually sequence the genes of bacteria looking for data packets. I can't say I really like the risk of creating all that new random genetic material though. Also, that timescale is maybe only for genes with selective value (not random ones). Essentially, this researcher told me that bacteria formed a huge supercomputer covering the entire planet.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From the presentation they claim to be able to store 900,000 GB of data in 1g of Bacteria, not 90 GB as stated in the (current) story title.
Anyone else see a security problem in opening a PDF from some source in China?
http://Communityville.com - A free place for new and old neighborhood webmasters to hang out.
Sorry, but data in e.coli? ... out of me. (in the most negative way)
It scares the
In the presentation attached to this link, it says theoretically 1 g of bacteria can store 900,000GB of data. That's a pretty significant change from what the title of here says. It is incredibly impractical now considering the costs of synthesizing nucleic acids and sequencing them later but it is appealing in a sci-fi way.
Warning! McAfee and Symantec have reported a new computer virus that is spreading widely over internet and snail mail. Actually it is not a virus, but an antibiotic, which will kill all your hard drive bacteria.
Security companies are working hand-on-hand with hard drive manufacturers for injecting the N-1 gene into the affected bacteria, with the hope of making them resistant to the virus or antibiotics, depending on how you want to call it. The medical community is getting nuts with the new definitions, and some people have even compared them to the Gb vs Gib war. There has also been discussion regarding the potential dangers of such bacteria mutating into a self-aware being. Oh wait, never mind. Please, every one move to SSD storage ASAP
From the PDF presentation file (linked to in the post) it seems that the amount of data wasn't actually 90 GB, but rather 900 TB! Quite a significant difference.
On page 35 of their PDF, the researchers claim that 1 gram of (wet weight) of E. coli = 450 two TB hard disks. That's 900 TB, not 90 GB -- 10,240 times more than this Slashdot article states.
If you ever want to quick-format your 90GB livedrive, just give it a a quick squirt of hand sanitizer, or disinfectant spray!
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/07/12/fabulous-prizes/
Don't think many people looked at the presentation; it's 900 TB per gram.