Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

previously: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14755429" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14755429</a>

I gloriously await from teenage hackers 10 years from now release CRISPR viruses&#x2F;worms that insert GIF meme pranks into the human population germ line, eventually triggering the apocalypse.<p>It seems our ability to mess stuff up is growing faster than our ability to defend against bugs. I shudder to think what happens when sloppy engineering practices or &quot;WannaCry&quot; meet biology. Hey, we&#x27;ve encrypted your germ line, and sterilized you, send Bitcoin to XXXXX to restore your fertility.

Here&#x27;s the image that was encoded:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Muybridge_horse_gallop_animated_2.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Muybridge_horse_gall...</a>

Can we stop with the slippery slope arguments? No, CRISPR will not be used be teenage hackers in the future to infect humans and keep them hostage. CRISPR can’t be “spread” or “transmitted” and is a local technique to introduce DNA snippets into the main genome of the organism. And to anyone who thinks that CRISPR could be potentially used to infect humans, this technology is nothing new: viruses have already had DNA editing machinery for millennia, search up retroviruses.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Retrovirus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Retrovirus</a>

They should encode some music on it and then watch the RIAA go apeshit trying to track down and kill all the copyright-infringing bacteria.

so storing data on multiple (billions of bacteria). I assume that you would have populations of duplicates and would piece together your entire original dataset (e.g. a tar) using start and end encoding tags? How do you re-sequence multiple populations of bacteria that you just grab from a sample sitting in a -80c freezer? You&#x27;d also have to prevent them from modifying their own genome and messing up your data.

I read the article, but I&#x27;m still quite confused. How exactly did they &quot;insert&quot; a computer image into living bacteria?? Do they mean they have stored binary code in the bacteria?? Or did they just physically create a fine image somewhere in the bacteria???

So, eventually we can look forward to getting rickrolled by a bout of food poisoning. And maybe get sued for piracy afterwards, for unauthorized duplication and distribution. Unless consideration of fair use is updated to include involuntarily crapping out copies.

How likely is it than storing arbitrary data in a bacteria&#x27;s DNA would allow it to create something dangerous for humans?

Inspecting for exfil just got a lot harder.

What are the odds this is being used for exfiltrating sensitive data? (Reminds me of a Culture novel, I think <i>Excession</i>, where one character tries to sneak information out of a ship by encoding it into the DNA of bacteria on, essentially, packages.)

What does this have to do with the GIF image format? Wouldn&#x27;t using something other than LZW compression give them a much faster converging restoration rate?

Anyone have any info on the amount of data that was encoded?<p>It looks like it was a low resolution image with 5 frames, so I expect it to be about 1 Kb, max?

If I hadn&#x27;t seen this tweeted around earlier, I would&#x27;ve guessed this title&#x2F;story generated by the HNSimulator markov bot.

When did techcrunch get bought out by Buzzfeed? &#x27;did your head just explode&#x27; is such a link-bait-douchy title

The next big <i>leap</i>: putting Pepe memes in a frog

Okay great, but how did the scientists pronounce it?

Look at my horse. My horse is amazing.

Pay-walled science don&#x27;t you just love it? Why do they bother - it isn&#x27;t science until you publish IMHO. This is just showing their rich friends.