GZipping Life Forms: Deflate Reveals Bare-Bones 245
An anonymous reader writes "To distinguish images derived from living vs. non-living sources, USC and NASA JPL researchers report today using the standard gzip compression utility. As a measure of overall pattern complexity, they find that the inherent pixel content of biologically generated fossils produces higher image compression ratios [more data redundancy], compared to their non-biological counterparts. The more the file shrinks, the more likely it is that a living process was involved. A test is live online here. This extends the simple, but powerful, uses of gzip to biogenic fossil detectors, in addition to spam cop filters, DNA sequence comparisons, digital camera image crunchers, etc. In nine months, the two Mars rovers will send back the first microscopic-scale images of Mars rocks, which should be amenable to some of these same techniques: thus gzipping is apparently pretty zippy."
Makes sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
Thought this would be somewhat obvious... (Score:2, Insightful)
Every one of us is incredibly redundant, and I don't just mean in our posts on slashdot!
Simply consider that you can have a reasonably good duplicate of yourself, with only the DNA contained in a single cell!
You may need most of your parts to be functional but, information-wise, it all comes down to 1 germ cell (say, a spermatozoid) and the aparatus needed to move it into proximity of another compatible germ cell ;)
Re:Be Humble (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it means that life contain less noise than non-life.
Re:Biological clocks in unicorns... (Score:3, Insightful)
42 (Score:2, Insightful)
42 is one byte.
Re:The fractal geometry of nature? (Score:3, Insightful)
For starters, how about the branching structure of the airways in your lungs?
Jeff
Re:Makes sense... (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyways as far as this technique is concered this (organic images being more compressable) only holds true for organicly created stromatolite structures vs. chemcialy created stromatolite-like structures.
They've only done 20 images or so, I'd like to know the comparitive compression ratios.
Pretty sloppy, you mean... (Score:3, Insightful)