To some degree this feels like exactly what they should have anticipated from the commercial crew program. The downside of going private is that you're at the mercy of capitalist interests that might not align with NASA's mission.

Starliner is a nightmare and should have been abandoned years ago. Part of me thinks they are only forcing Boeing to keep working on it out of spite.

Dragon/Falcon 9 is so well-established I wonder if NASA can effectively license it from SpaceX and operate it themselves.

I was thinking Synonym Toast Crunch

The catch is easier but with the chopsticks they can set the booster right back on the pad for refueling, theoretically

Chitin is a real biopolymer that makes up shells.

There are some organisms that have been modified to produce polymers from varuous food sources, but those are more for biofermentation production processes than something the organisms would use as a shell

Sorry I am sleep deprived and read both "Ronald D. Moore" as JMS and Battlestar Galactica as Babylon 5

S3:E13

Then in the middle of the hardest hitting writing in SciFi there's a ham-fisted, horribly directed episode about King Arthur coming out of Vorlon deep freeze or whatever

Edit: Sorry I am sleep deprived and read both "Ronald D. Moore" as JMS and Battlestar Galactica as Babylon 5

Wednesday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_(TV_series)

I read this meme as a satire on the nature of graduate school research projects, where you often spend inordinate amounts of time repeating the same type of experiment in a variety of ways. This lets you publish either on the sheer body of work or, ideally, one of the products is particularly interesting and you get a bigger paper from it alone.

The "substrates" in this meme are odd and difficult to react, which again reflects many thesis projects. Also there are no stated goals and success is hard to measure or define.

Despite the absurdity of the scientific work, the subject still chooses to perform it even though they are deprived of real world relationships formed at Susan's baby shower and may also directly degrade their relationships with their Mom, brother's girlfriend, and dog because of it while also putting their health in jeopardy via cell alkylation.

Interesting. This feels like a variant of EMDR which is a pretty well-known therapy but isn't mentioned in the article

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22641-emdr-therapy

I've been using bitwig on Linux for hobby production for about a year now. It works but it's fairly buggy, with very sluggish controls and more frequent plugin crashes. I despise windows so won't go back, but I'd also love to see continued improvement. One big step would be for more plugin developers to release CLAP versions.

I don't know the full process for making these, but I can take a fairly educated guess.

First they are going to take the DNA sample and use a reaction called PCR to amplify it. This will copy a small section of DNA, not the whole sequence. For the PCR to work for all of their customers, this has to be a region* that nearly everyone has in their DNA.

They then take the PCR product and treat it with different enzymes that are like molecular scissors which will chop at specific sub-sequences. The personal nature of the art comes from small differences between people in the region amplified in the original PCR. Different sequence = different cuts = different lengths of pieces.

They then run the enzyme digests on a gel, which is like a slab of thick jello. The bigger the piece, the slower it moves so the pieces separate. The lanes on the sides are a standard "ladder" of known sized pieces. You can visualize these gels under a UV lamp.

They can either use molecular tags or, more likely, photoshop to make the art piece look more interesting.

There is not any actual sequencing of the DNA happening in this process, and the band patterns are pretty low-resolution so it's unlikely that this could be used to identify someone.

If this is a legitimate operation, then there is not a situation where the art company has an unsecured disk with lots of DNA sequences on it.

All that said, the concern about sharing genetic material with random companies is valid because they could also sequence it if they wanted to, but that would be relatively expensive and actively malicious. I believe the risk is low but non-zero, and everyone will have a different comfort level with that.

If you want alternative options you might be able to find an open lab or local college that will work with you to run your own PCR and gel, then photoshop the result yourself.

Hope that helps you make a more informed decision.

*To be a little more pedantic, everyone has to have the same ends of the region where the copying starts and stops. The part in between, which is a small fraction of your total DNA, can still be different.