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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
Bateria?
Was the research funded by Bruce Wayne
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.
I see no posts tagged other than funny in this story's future...
"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.
No, it doesn't.
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.
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".'
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
Does "1g of bacteria" mean 1000 or 1024 milligrams?
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.
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."
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?
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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