World’s Smallest Tape Recorder Stored in Bacteria

protribune.com

36 pointshughes735 comments

misleading title:

makes it seem as if it's recording sound. in reality, it's just a mechanism to incorporate time into the dna material.

(has nothing to do with sound energy at all).

Looks to me like a bot generated the article, given its weird capitalization and inconsitent internal references. Here is the press release from Columbia University:

http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2017/11/23/microbe-ta...

Can a HN admin please change the link to the one that maj0rhn gives above? It seems to be the original source and better written and includes diagrams.

I also felt that the Pro Tribune version of the articles was bot-generated because of the capitalization: "that helps Enzymes known as", "changing signs with Electronics", "in response to a Particular signal". They occur at roughly the same column position, so it looks like the result of a fixed-line-length copy&paste into a word processor that auto-capitalized each new line. Horrible editing for them to not notice this.

Interestingly, it's been updated to fix those since you wrote this. Someone is paying attention.

Wouldn't a bot be pretty good at capitalization? Seems more plausible that it was written by a German. Afterall, in German, nouns are capitalized.

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