Posted on 01/09/2011 9:09:30 AM PST by decimon
HONG KONG (AFP) The US' national archives occupy more than 500 miles (800 kilometres) of shelving; France's archives stretch for more than 100 miles of shelves, as do Britain's.
Yet a group of students at Hong Kong's Chinese University are making strides towards storing such vast amounts of information in an unexpected home: the E.coli bacterium better known as a potential source of serious food poisoning.
"This means you will be able to keep large datasets for the long term in a box of bacteria in the refrigerator," said Aldrin Yim, a student instructor on the university's biostorage project, a 2010 gold medallist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s prestigious iGEM competition.
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"Bacteria can't be hacked," points out Allen Yu, another student instructor.
"All kinds of computers are vulnerable to electrical failures or data theft. But bacteria are immune from cyber attacks. You can safeguard the information."
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Sounds like an initial step towards organic computers.
“”Bacteria can’t be hacked,” points out Allen Yu, another student instructor.”
If they can be programmed, they can be hacked.
Please make it stop
Opps! I spilled my antibiotics in your memory bank. Sorry!
What happens when the bacteria kick off? How do they back it up? Better read entire article.
On another plane, have you ever smelled that stuff? I had a school buddy who used a little too much suction on a minim pipette and swallowed her specimen. Our prof wigged out. Same poor guy who ran the lab when another school buddy stuck her head too close to a Bunsen burner and set it on fire. Then there was the time that somebody misplaced our unknowns so not only were the cultures unknown, their whereabouts were unknown, too.
'Cloroxing ' could be a new term for permanently deleting incriminating data.
The way bacteria multiple, you might have backups everywhere. ;-)
Just read the whole article.
Musical intestinal flora?
There are no words....
Musical intestinal flora?
Been there done that.
"...but the dog inhaled my homework!"
How do you think they address mutations? (You don’t want to hear about my basic genetics class.) From what I recall, the mutants are usually weak and don’t survive, but there are those exceptions usually induced by some additional variable (MRSA and VRE)....
And can now recite Shakespeare.
If the dog ingests your homework you can always turn it in late in a pooper scooper.
Heretofore known as growling.
What’s wrong with 20gb C-dif?
Until someone accidentally trips over the power cord and pulls the plug...
Isn’t growling borborygmi?
Well, there's a new word. But working into conversation could be tough.
Not to worry. Nobody in the world would want to work it into a conversation. :)
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