Running ‘Doom’ on E. coli cells… very, very slowly
SMRTR summary
Somewhere between biotech breakthrough and beautiful absurdity, an MIT PhD student has figured out how to run Doom on living bacteria. Lauren "Ren" Ramlan engineered a display made entirely of E. coli cells, programming them to glow like pixels on a screen.
The catch? Each frame takes about 70 minutes to illuminate and over 8 hours to fade. At that rate, completing the original game would take roughly 599 years.
Ramlan herself seems delightfully aware of the project's place in history. "This is an amazing find," she deadpans, "because it means we are a small handful of generations away from the peak of human engineering... where Doom and life become one."
It joins a long, wonderfully strange tradition of hobbyists hacking the 1993 classic onto pregnancy tests, tractors, and ATMs. Apparently, the only real requirement, as Ramlan puts it, is "a screen and willpower."
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to lobste.rs.
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