By Elizabeth French, Justin Melvin, and Erica Newman
Answer: TENDINOPATHIES

Solvers are presented with multiple 10×10 grids of pictures, each consisting of visually similar pictures in the style of the “canine or cuisine” meme.

For each group of images, solvers must first identify which images are dogs and which are food. Treating those as black and white, respectively, yields four data matrices:


Labrador or Fried Chicken

Dalmatian or Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

Shar Pei or Croissant

Chihuahua or Muffin

Scanning the data matrices in order yields the phrase PRIME RED RGBA. Therefore, solvers must next search the RGBA channel of the image for pixels where the red channels is prime. Treating pixels with prime red values as black and all other pixels as white yields the following image:

This QR code scans to METADATA DESCRIPTION FLIP BITS JPEG. The description field of the image’s XMP metadata contains a string of roughly 4000 hex digits. Decoding the hex values, flipping all bits (i.e. XORing with 0xFF), and treating the resulting data as a JPEG image yields the following:

This is a Code 128 barcode containing the string TENDINOPATHIES, which is the answer.