A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.

  • brsrklf@jlai.lu
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    9 days ago

    Average weight for a starling is less than 100g. The whole thing with head and feathers and bones and whatever. You’d have to be very hungry to hunt that. And I suspect if you shoot at it you’d pulverize it completely.

    Though cats are going to be a problem.

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      9 days ago

      There will be a lot of cases where the data gets accidentally encapsulated (then fragmented due to incompatible protocols) in a cat.