https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220923153032.htm > From a box of Cracker Jack to The Da Vinci Code, everybody enjoys deciphering secret messages. But biomedical engineers at Duke University have taken the decoder ring to place it's never been before -- the patterns created by bacterial colonies. > Depending on the initial conditions used, such as nutrient levels and space constraints, bacteria tend to grow in specific ways. The researchers created a virtual bacterial colony and then controlled growth conditions and the numbers and sizes of simulated bacterial dots to create an entire alphabet based on how the colonies would look after they fill a virtual Petri dish. They call this encoding scheme emorfi.